She’d scaled the trees outside her family members’ chamber windows and hung ribbons from the branches to make the world more colorful for them when they’d stolen a glance outside, then regaled them with songs and stories . . . until one of her eldest brothers was sent to pluck her back to safety.

That safety invariably resulted in an uproar of her parents lecturing her on the dangers, and her siblings lamenting that they had a sister as precocious as she, and she’d been ultimately lost in the proverbial shuffle.

Through it all, there’d never not been noise.

Shivering on the window seat in her Corner Parlor, the blankets wrapped about her person, Myrtle sat with this new, dreaded, unfamiliar, and awful silence.

She stared off and out at the duke’s household.

At least Val was near.

And in thinking of him in his big, lonely household, she felt less alone in hers.

Creeeeak.

She jumped, her heart racing as she whipped her gaze off in the direction of those eerie groans of the old house, ones she’d failed to hear when her family and their staff had been sharing these walls. But now, in her solitary state, everything was louder. And everything was more terrifying.

“Stop i-it,” she whispered, her teeth clanking together, only it wasn’t solely from the cold. That trembling came from the fear in being alone.

And then she heard it.

Rap-Pause-Rap-Pause-Rap.

And then absolute silence followed that last, faint knock.

Myrtle froze. She was hearing things, was all.

She was—

Then it came again.

Rap-Pause-Rap-Pause-Rap.

A patterned knocking, as if the person on the other side of that door knocked without wishing to be heard.

As if they sought to confirm no one was within the house so that they might invade and sneak their way in.

Her mouth dry and a sheen of perspiration coating her palms, Myrtle swung her legs over the side of the bench, letting her stockinged feet hit the floor.

It came again:

Rap-Pause-Rap-Pause-Rap.

Padding across the room, Myrtle grabbed the steel poker next to the cold, barren hearth and, clutching it close, crept toward the sound of that rhythmic tapping.

As she picked her way quickly through the house, she took care to avoid the noisiest, most unforgiving of the floorboards, the chill of the floors scarcely penetrating. All her attention remained locked on the direction of that tapping.

At last, she reached the foyer.

Only silence met her.

Whoever had shown up on her doorstep had ceased knocking.

Because they verified no one is here. Because they know the household is empty . . .

Terror sent Myrtle’s gut into upheaval, churning and twisting as it always did when her family insisted she ride the boats at their family lake and she invariably ended up casting the contents of her stomach into that same body of water.