Chapter 7 — Things Left Unturned

Sandra’s POV

I closed my hand around the casing and stood there in the doorway for a moment just breathing.

Wolfbane. In my room. Before the Blood Ceremony, before the dagger, before any of it — someone was already moving pieces around a board I hadn’t known I was sitting on the first time. I’d spent six years in this house thinking I was invisible and apparently I’d been wrong about that too.

“When,” I said.

“This morning. Between breakfast and when you came back from the grounds.” Dara’s voice was steady but her hands weren’t. She had them folded together in that specific way she did when she was holding herself in. “I went in to change the linen and I could tell. The things on your desk were a quarter inch from where you leave them. Your trunk was unlocked. Whoever it was, was careful. Just not careful enough.”

I looked down at the casing in my palm. Small. Professional. Not something you picked up at a market stall — this was made for precision, for carrying a concentrated amount without spillage or scent until you wanted the scent to be there.

Someone had been in my room looking for something. Or checking on something. Or leaving something behind and then thought better of it.

I didn’t know which yet. All three options were unpleasant.

“Did you see anyone in the corridor,” I said.

“No. But the east stairwell door was still warm when I checked it. Someone had just come through.”

The east stairwell. The same wing where that door had been cracked open. Where Vanessa had disappeared with the man I didn’t recognize. I kept my face easy because Dara was already frightened and frightening her further wasn’t going to help either of us.

“Okay,” I said.

“Okay?” She looked at me. “Sandra—”

“I heard you. Thank you for telling me.” I closed my fingers around the casing. “Don’t mention this to anyone.”

She held my gaze for a long moment. Reading me the way she always did, looking for the thing underneath the surface. Whatever she found there made her go quiet, which meant she’d found something she wasn’t sure she recognized. The same thing Zadok had found on the bench. The same thing Vanessa’s eyes had done at the breakfast table.

People were starting to notice the edges of the difference and I needed to be more careful about that.

“Alright,” Dara said finally. She unfolded her hands and smoothed her apron and became practical again the way she always did when she’d decided worrying wasn’t useful. “Lunch is in an hour.”

She left.

I went upstairs.

My room looked exactly as I’d left it to anyone who didn’t know better. Dara was right — the differences were small. My journal two inches left of its usual place. The chair angled slightly wrong. My trunk not quite fully closed. I moved through the room slowly, touching things without moving them, trying to understand the search pattern.

They’d checked the obvious places first. Under the mattress, inside the trunk, behind the desk. Then the less obvious — the space beneath the loose floorboard near the window that I actually did use in the first life to keep small things I didn’t want found. I crossed to it and pressed the board and it gave the way it always had and the small hollow beneath it was empty.

Because I hadn’t put anything there yet. I’d been back less than two days.

So whoever searched this room did it knowing that hollow existed.

That narrowed things considerably. That hollow wasn’t visible. You had to know the room well enough to know where to press or you had to have been told. And the people who’d spent enough time in this room to know it that well I could count on one hand.

Dara. My father, once or twice. And one other person who’d come to find me here a handful of times in the first life — always uninvited, always with a reason that sounded reasonable enough that I’d never questioned it.

Vanessa.

I sat on the edge of the bed and turned the casing over in my fingers and thought about what she would’ve been looking for. I was eighteen. I hadn’t done anything yet. I hadn’t made any moves, hadn’t gathered anything, hadn’t positioned myself in any way that should’ve threatened anyone.

Which meant she wasn’t looking for something I’d done.

She was looking for something she was afraid I might know.

That was a different problem entirely. In the first life I’d known nothing. I’d been exactly what I appeared — a girl too busy loving the wrong person to look at anything else properly. She’d had no reason to search my room in the first life because I’d been harmless. Obviously, visibly, completely harmless.

This version of me had sat at breakfast and not flinched when Zadok walked in. Had walked out to the garden and spoken to him without her voice doing the thing it used to do. Had met Vanessa’s eyes over the table and held them without looking away first.

Small things. But Vanessa was someone who read small things.

She’d felt the difference and she’d moved within hours.

I needed to recalibrate. I was being too visible in exactly the wrong ways — not drawing attention with big actions but with small absences, with the things I wasn’t doing that I used to do. I’d underestimated how closely she’d been watching me all along.

I tucked the casing into my pocket and went to the window and looked out at the estate below. The training grounds, the east wing, the long gravel path that led from the main gate up through the territory. People moving through their day, pack life doing what it did, ordinary and unhurried on the surface.

Nothing in this house was ordinary.

I was starting to understand that the first life hadn’t been the simple story I’d told myself. I’d had a main character’s access to this world for six years and I’d used it to look at one person and nothing else. I’d missed everything happening in the peripheral because I’d been too busy staring at the center.

I wasn’t doing that again.

The door knocked twice. Short, sharp, not Dara’s knock.

I turned from the window and crossed the room and opened it.

The man from the training grounds was standing in my doorway. Up close he was older than I’d thought, with eyes that had the specific flatness of someone paid to be unreadable. He looked at me without any of the social performance people usually layered over a first interaction.

“Miss Whitmore,” he said. “I was asked to give you this.”

He held out a folded note. Plain paper, no seal.

I took it without touching his hand.

He left without another word.

I unfolded the note and read it once. Then again. Then I stood there in my doorway and felt the floor shift slightly beneath everything I thought I’d understood about why I came back.

Four words. That was all.

You were never safe.