The palace at night was a different creature entirely.
During the day it hummed and clicked with motion. Servants moved in currents. Laughter floated from distant courtyards. The whole place breathed like something alive and restless. But after dark, the silence was not peaceful. It was watchful. The kind of quiet that pressed against the ears and made a person wonder what it was hiding.
Ethan lay on Su Yan's bed with his eyes closed and his body still.
Qingzao had fallen asleep within twenty minutes, curled on a mat near the door with her blanket pulled up to her chin. Her breathing was slow and even. Genuinely out.
Ethan was not.
He had his fox ears tilted forward under the cover of his hair, listening to the courtyard beyond the window. Footsteps. Wind. The distant sound of a guard's patrol rounding the far corner of the outer wall. He catalogued each sound and filed it away.
An hour passed. Then another.
The footsteps he eventually heard were not the ones he expected.
