One month ago, a woman named Stasla Belikova died in the Ural Mountains. Belikova was a ghost according to Court. She didn't exist in the eyes of any database they put her name into, but what was a guardian with hundreds of molnija marks doing in a remote village on the Kazakh border? A young dhampir breaks into the queen's bedchambers on a mission: someone inside Court killed her mother and she wants to find out who, starting with the decades-old murder of a guardian named Rose Hathaway.