LUCA'S POV
I waited until the house went completely quiet.
Three in the morning had a particular stillness to it here, the kind that settled in after the guards found their positions and stopped moving around and the building itself seemed to exhale and compress like everything in it had agreed to hold its breath for a few hours. I'd been learning this for two nights without doing anything about it, just lying in the dark with my eyes open, counting sounds and mapping silences and tracking what changed and what stayed the same between one hour and the next.
The guard rotation happened at midnight and again at three. The stretch between them was the longest undisturbed window this house offered and that was my window.
