Chapter 15 — Two Little Heartbeats
For the first time in five years, the packhouse smelled like bread.
It rose up through the floors with the woodsmoke — real bread, crown wheat, ovens that hadn't been warm since the blight going all night to feed the line of families at the kitchen door. Somewhere below, someone was playing a fiddle badly and being cheered for it. The house that had been a held breath for half a decade was learning, clumsily, to exhale.
Three floors up, in the nursery of the east wing, Knox Thorne lay in a magnificent new bed and glared at the ceiling like it owed him money.
"I can't sleep. The ceiling's wrong."
"The ceiling is structurally excellent," Ash said from the other bed, not looking up from his notebook. "I checked the beams. This is the safest building in
