The safehouse door was barred from the inside. That was all Aeris needed to see. Rhea hadn't even finished with her count of the guards, but the message was already clear.Three long days on the road had finally brought the trio to Millbrook Ferry, a tight mass of houses and muggy streets huddled on a river bend. Imperial grain barges clustered on the docks, coughing up their cargo for the capital. Rhea’s intel had been dead on, third house past the tanner’s yard, blue shutters, a cloth merchant who kept to herself. Ophelia Rask. The next name on a list that started with Cedric Vane’s bloody corpse, still cooling in a collapsed ritual chamber just a week before.“She’s already spooked,” Rhea muttered, crouching beside Aeris in the deep shadow of a grain cart. “Look at the windows.”Aeris checked, sure enough, the place seemed almost hermetically sealed. The evening air was warm, but every shutter had been yanked closed, and those faint glimmers of ward-light tracing the sills weren’t l