Cassiopeia had not known about Danton.
That ignorance had not arrived as a single, clean absence. It had settled into her life quietly, layer by layer, hidden beneath family dinners, rehearsed smiles, closed doors, servants of the Ancestral Mansion who lowered their eyes too quickly, and the kind of careful silence that old houses cultivated better than gardens.
By the time she understood there had been a truth buried beneath her childhood, the burial had already become architecture.
Walls had been built around her without the sound of hammer or stone, and she had grown up inside them believing the shape of the prison was simply the shape of home.
When Phei asked her how the boy came to be, where the real twin had gone, what machinery had produced that nightmare and then dressed it in the clothes of family, Cassiopeia had only been able to give him the truth.
The truth had been nothing.
No details, names or some kind of secret room she could point toward.
