She poked her nose around the bedroom door cautiously. No, there was nobody lurking in ambush. It worked! She told herself. A quick dash to the bathroom and she was ready to activate her plan. Ready, apart from a hollow feeling in the pit of her stomach, anyway. “Damn. I’ll need money.” She ransacked the reception room in haste, hunting for her personal effects, and found them in a closed bureau of exquisite workmanship—her wallet, driving license, credit cards, and house keys. Either the servants didn’t dare tamper with the private possessions of a relative of the duke—or they didn’t know what they were. She found some other items in the bureau that shook her—her snub-nosed pistol and a box of ammunition that she didn’t remember buying. “What is this?” she asked herself before putting the gun in her jacket pocket. She kept her hand around it. If what she was planning didn’t work…well, she’d jump that hurdle when she reached it.

They’re treating me as family, she realized. Adult, mature, sensible family, not like Olga the ditz. Servants and assassins crawling out of the woodwork, it’s a whole different world. Oh my.

Carefully not thinking too hard about the likely consequences of her actions, Miriam walked to the center of the reception room between sofa and fireplace, snapped open her locket with her left hand, and focused on the design inside.

“Owww!” She stumbled slightly and cradled her forehead. Vision blurred, and everything throbbed. “Shit!” She blinked furiously through the pounding of her abruptly upgraded headache. The room was still there: bureau, chairs, fireplace—

“I wondered how long you’d take,” Roland said from behind her.

She whirled, bringing her gun to bear, then stopped. “Jesus, don’t do that!”

Roland watched her from the sofa, one hand holding a pocket watch, the other stretched out along the cushioned back. He was wearing a sports jacket and chinos with an open-necked shirt, like a stockbroker on casual Friday.

The sofa was identical to the unoccupied one in the suite she’d just left—or so close as to be its twin. But Roland wasn’t the only different feature of the room. The quality of light coming in through the window was subtly altered, and some items had appeared on the side table, and the bedroom door was shut. “This isn’t the same apartment,” she said slowly, past the fog of headache. “It’s a doppelgänger, right? And we’re on the other side. My side.”

Roland nodded. “Are you going to shoot me or not?” he asked. “Because if you aren’t, you ought to put that away.”

“Oops. Sorry.” She lowered the pistol carefully and pointed it at the floor. “You startled me.”

Roland relaxed visibly. “I think it’s safe to say that you startled me, too. Do you always carry a gun when you explore your house?”