The morning sky was the color of the hollow exhaustion under someone's eyes after a sleepless night.
When Fu Tailan walked out of the manor's main building wearing a middle-aged woman's face, stepping into the early dawn light, the entire Westley Manor had already descended into a fog of confusion and disorder.
The vanished annex and all the staff inside it were like a vast stretch of severed nerve endings — commands could no longer be sent out, let alone carried out.
On top of that, when Westley's body was discovered, it landed like another blow to the head of an already-reeling brain. The manor convulsed in Fu Tailan's wake — shuddering, struggling, groaning as it tried to hold itself together — too consumed by its own crisis to spare any attention for monitoring the comings and goings of personnel.
He had left Ivan unconscious alongside an unconscious maid in a storage room, and left the door to Westley's study wide open behind him.
