Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Exodus 12:30 describes Pharaoh rising in the night, and with him every one of his servants and every surviving Mizraee. The great cry goes up. And then the Aramaic adds a detail that makes the horror concrete: "there was no house of the Mizraee where the firstborn was not dead."
No family was spared. The rabbis paused over the sentence because it contains a social nightmare. Every neighbor in every neighborhood. Every daughter who had become the firstborn when an older brother died. Every son of a slave who had become the family's heir. The text does not present this as collective punishment — it presents it as the tragic consequence of a national economy that had built itself on Israel's backs.
Pharaoh rises first. His position is deliberate. The king of the land awakens and walks through his own house to find his heir lost. Then he learns that every household in Mizraim is the same house as his. The kingdom he thought separated him from his subjects has collapsed overnight into shared grief.
The Midrash often asked why Pharaoh himself was not killed. He was a firstborn, too. The answer given is that he had to survive in order to witness the Exodus, to pursue Israel to the sea, and eventually to be buried in its waters. His death was postponed so that the full arc of the story could complete.
Takeaway: Even a throne room can become a house of mourning. On the night of the firstborn, every Egyptian roof had the same ceiling.