Matthias has a little helper, she realized. How many people did he kill? A great house like this, you couldn’t send all of the servants away—but murdering the skeleton staff bespoke a degree of extreme ruthlessness. Angbard hadn’t been suspicious enough of his own deputy: He’d let Matthias pick and choose staff assignments. Now it looked like she was going to be stuck paying the price.

“Matthias always has a backup plan,” she muttered to herself. “If I was a sick spider sitting at the center of a web, waiting to sting my employer, what would I do?”

She opened the door cautiously. “Roland was afraid of bombs—” She stopped. Where? “The armory is where you store explosives. It’s built to contain a blast. But if Matthias had an accomplice the explosive might be human—”

She panted, taking in shallow breaths. Stop that. Matthias blackmailed people. How many? And what could he make them do—wait for the Clan rescue expedition to show up, then bring the house down on them?

The pantry was empty, a door standing ajar on the kitchen and servants’ stairwell at the end of the hallway. Miriam hit the stairs. It corkscrewed upstairs dizzyingly, halls branching off it toward each wing of the family accommodation. She climbed it carefully, revolver in hand, cautiously scanning the steps ahead for signs of a tripwire. Hoping that the dead servants meant that there’d be no eyes left to watch the video screens. Second floor, east wing, through the security doors on the left, she repeated to herself, hoping that the surveillance, if it existed at all, would prove to be habit-blind.

The east wing corridor was as silent as a crypt, as empty as the passages of a high-class hotel in the small hours of the morning while the guests sleep. Any guests here were liable to be dead in their beds. Miriam came out of the servant’s stairwell and darted down the side of the corridor, crouching instinctively. She paused at the solid wooden doors at one side of the passage and swiped the card-key she’d borrowed from Roland through the scanner at one side. When she heard the latch click, she pushed one door open with a toe and stepped through. This is the security zone? It looked like more rooms, opening off a short corridor—offices, maybe, and Angbard’s outer office door right ahead.

She paused before the door. Her heart was pounding. You. She looked at it. Someone was inside. Whoever killed the servants. A ticking human bomb. Growing anger made her feel dizzy. She carefully moved to one side and raised her gun.

“I really wouldn’t do that,” said a sad voice right behind her left ear.

“Put the gun down and turn around slowly.”

She froze, then dropped the pistol and turned around. “Why?” she asked.