To Prisoner 817,
Your petition for clemency is, once again, denied. Your continued existence is a testament to my brother's sentimentality, a weakness I do not share. Do not mistake his silence for forgiveness. He remembers your every transgression.
Your new neighbor, the girl named Clara Wren, has proven to be quite resilient. A pity. Lady Valestra prefers her pets to be more pliable. I am told the Bone-Reaper is a master of persuasion. Perhaps you will hear her screams and remember the cost of defiance.
Do not write to me again.
S.V.
Isadora read it once. Twice. A third time. The words blurred, the ink seeming to swim before her eyes. Prisoner 817. Clara. The Bone-Reaper. It was all there. A casual, cruel confirmation of every nightmare she had imagined. Seraphyne knew. She knew Clara was in Viregate, being tormented, and she wrote of it with the detached amusement of someone commenting on the weather.
The letter wasn't a secret Isadora had stumbled upon. It was a message. Seraphyne had wanted her to find it. She had orchestrated the entire "dress fitting" to place this piece of information in her hands. Why? To torture her? To drive her back to Caelan?
To show her just how powerless she truly was.
A low growl of pure, undiluted fury escaped her throat. She crumpled the letter in her fist, the paper crackling in the oppressive silence of the kitchen. They thought she was a pawn. A frightened little mouse to be tormented for their amusement. Seraphyne, with her veiled threats. Valestra, with her monstrous cruelty. And the Duke... the Duke, with his silent, suffocating control.
They were all monsters. And they had underestimated her. They had taken her sister. They had broken her father. They had destroyed her home. They had left her with nothing to lose.
And a girl with nothing to lose was the most dangerous creature of all.
She unclenched her fist, smoothing the crumpled letter on the wooden table. Her mind was surprisingly clear, the fog of grief and fear burned away by the cold fire of her rage. She could not fight them with swords or money. She could not appeal to a justice system they owned.
But she was Isadora Wren. She knew secrets. She knew how to thread a needle in the dark. She was a seamstress, a designer. She saw the patterns others missed, the hidden seams in the fabric of their world.
And she had a secret of her own now. Two, in fact. The letter, and the cufflink. A piece of the sister, and a piece of the brother. Leverage. It wasn't much, but it was a start.
Her gaze fell again upon the silver wolf's head. He had refused to take it back. He had insisted it now belonged in her world. Very well. If he would not come to her world, she would have to drag him into it. She would force him to see the squalor and the debt and the blood that his gilded existence was built upon.
She would not beg for his help. She would not plead for his mercy.
She would make him an offer. A bargain. His cufflink, his precious secret token of their "bond," in exchange for the truth. In exchange for Clara.
She knew she couldn't march back to Mirewood Hall. They would never let her past the gates. She needed to draw him out. She needed to force his hand in a way he couldn't ignore, in a place he couldn't control.
And suddenly, she knew how. A plan, mad and desperate, began to form in her mind. It was a gamble of such spectacular risk that her breath caught in her chest. It could get her killed. It would, at the very least, destroy what was left of her reputation forever.
But respectability was a luxury for girls who had sisters to protect and fathers to rely on. She had neither.
She looked at the crumpled letter from the Vampiress. She looked at the silver cufflink from the Duke. A prisoner's plea and a predator's claim.
This was her world now. And she would burn it to the ground to get her sister back.
The cold fire of rage was a strange and unfamiliar companion. It did not burn hot and fast, but settled deep in her bones, a cold, clear certainty that banished all fear. Sleep was an impossible luxury, a shore she could not reach across a black sea of betrayal.
She did not wait for the sun.
Leaving her father to his wretched, snoring sleep in the armchair, Isadora descended the narrow stairs from their apartment. The familiar bell above the shop door remained silent as she slipped into the heart of their world: Wren & Co.
The workshop was cast in deep shadow, the moonlight painting silver stripes across the floor through the tall front windows. Here, the air was different. It smelled of order, of history. Of raw silk and hot iron, of her father's pipe tobacco ground into the floorboards, and the faint, clean scent of chalk. It was the smell of her life.
Her plan, the mad, desperate ember that had sparked in the kitchen, began to glow hotter. To execute it, she needed to know the full truth. She needed to understand the depth of the rot that had taken root in her family while she'd been busy stitching gowns for the very monsters who'd caused it.
Her father was a man of meticulous habit. His secrets, she knew, would not be kept carelessly. They would be filed away, hidden in plain sight within the very order he cherished.
She started at his cutting table, a massive slab of oak scarred with a million forgotten cuts. Her hands traced its surface, feeling for loose joints, for hollow spaces. Nothing. She moved to his desk, her fingers ghosting over the neat stacks of ledgers. She knew them intimately; she was the one who balanced them. But had he kept another set? A secret accounting of his soul?
She pulled open the drawers. One held his fine German shears, another his chalks and measuring tapes, a third held client records. All in their proper place. But the last drawer, the one on the bottom right, was shallower than the others. She'd always thought it a quirk of the cabinetmaker.
Now, with eyes sharpened by fury, she saw it for what it was. A lie.
Her heart began to beat a little faster. She pulled the drawer all the way out and set it on the floor. Reaching into the dark cavity, her fingers met not the back of the desk, but another piece of smooth, finished wood. A false back. Her nails found a tiny groove along the edge. She pulled. It slid free with a soft, woody sigh.
And there, in the secret space behind, lay a small, oilskin-wrapped bundle tied with twine.
It was heavier than she expected.
She carried it to the cutting table, the moonlight her only lamp. Her hands, usually so steady, trembled as she unwound the twine. The oilskin fell away to reveal a stack of letters. At the top were several notices, their paper cheap and thin, the script aggressive and demanding.
Debt notices from a collector acting on behalf of Lady Valestra.
Each one was more threatening than the last. Payment is overdue. Interest accrues daily. Your daughter's service is not considered sufficient payment for your outstanding principal. The words were clinical, brutal. And at the bottom of each, a chilling sign-off: The Hill watches.
So the cufflink hadn't marked them. They were already marked. The Duke's interest had simply illuminated the target that was already on their backs.
Beneath the notices was a thinner stack of letters, the paper finer, the envelopes sealed with wax that had been broken and re-melted several times. His secret correspondence.
And at the very bottom, tucked away as if it were the most damning secret of all, was a single, tattered envelope. It bore no stamp, no address. It was folded and worn, as if it had been read a hundred times. The handwriting on the front was faint, but she could just make it out.
For Elias. From Viregate.
A choked sound escaped her throat. This was it. This was the source of the rot.
She didn't open it. Not yet. She carefully bundled the letters back together, slid the false panel into place, and returned the drawer to the desk. She took only the letter from Viregate, tucking it into the pocket of her dress alongside the one from Seraphyne. Two sides of the same terrible story.
She returned upstairs to the kitchen and waited. She did not light a lamp. She sat in the dark, the two letters on the table before her, and watched the grey light of dawn slowly bleed into the sky.
She heard him stir just as the first birds began to sing. A low groan, followed by the clumsy scrape of the armchair on the floor. She heard him shuffle to the water basin, the sound of him splashing his face frantic and loud. She sat perfectly still, her hands folded in her lap, her rage cooled into something hard and sharp, like a shard of ice in her heart.
He appeared in the kitchen doorway, a silhouette against the growing light. He was a wreck of a man. His clothes were rumpled and stained, his silver-streaked hair a wild mess, his face pale and puffy. He flinched when he saw her sitting there, a flicker of guilt—or was it fear?—in his bloodshot eyes.
"Isadora," he rasped, his voice thick with sleep and shame. "You're up early."
"I didn't sleep," she replied, her own voice unnervingly calm. She gestured to the chair opposite her. "Sit down, Father."