(Liora POV)
The lower cells smelled of rust and despair, the kind that settled into your clothes and never quite washed out. I moved through the shadows like I belonged there—another servant girl with a tray of stale bread and thin gruel, head bowed, eyes down. The guards barely glanced at me anymore. Familiarity was the best disguise.
I'd spent the last two days mapping the tower routes from the servants' passages: blind corners, forgotten stairwells, the one loose flagstone in the third-floor landing that let me slip into the ventilation shaft behind the chamber walls. Tonight the shaft was my way in.
Nova was still in the tower room. I could feel her light through the stone—dimmer than before, flickering like a candle in wind, but alive. Stubborn. I pressed my palm to the cold wall and let a thread of silver healing light seep through the cracks—just enough to ease the worst of the whip burns without alerting the wards. She would feel it. She would know someone was coming.
