The morning arrived in the Valeran house with the polite choreography of rehearsed sorrow.
Condolence calls were ordered like place settings: Lord Thorne's clipped sympathies, Lady Mireille's cooing concern, and merchants weaving in flattering offers like nets.
The staff moved with the steady, invisible precision of people who'd secretly trained to make calamity respectable.
From her sitting room, Nyx watched the visitors cross the gravel in dark coats and silks—the family's world reduced to whispers and polite distance. She felt a strange detachment, as if the day belonged to someone else performing grief on her behalf.
Victor kept to his appointed motions: a call at ten, a meeting at eleven, a lunch arranged for reputations and ledger friends.
Cassandra flitted through the rooms in a gown of measured gray, every seam a statement of control.
Seraphine floated on the surface of it all, her face arranged to reflect the right measure of sorrow, her hands already folding notes of future engagements into the fabric of a social calendar.
Elara sat farther back, a small motionless presence, eyes like two flints that took in everything and burned nothing away.
Nyx decided she could not wait for people to explain what they would not.
She moved to the study—the room Victor kept for contracts, a bank of ordered paper and a mahogany desk that smelled of old ink and new calculations.
The portrait behind the desk watched her with the stillness of oil; she slid her fingers along the edge of the chair as if testing the grain of the house for weakness.
The safe was tucked behind a portrait panel, a small private thing the family treated like a second heart.
When she eased the panel aside and lifted the lid, the orderly pile of deeds and stamped folios looked like the tidy lies of a well-run life.
And then her hand met absence.
A hollow space sat between two stacks where paper should have been—an empty place defined by the leather seam and the quickest impression of missing weight.
Nyx's breath thinned.
Somewhere between the revised will that favored Seraphine and an older draft, there was a gap. The gap was a wound in leather.
She knew what absent pages meant.
Paper, the household's small holy thing, was where promises came to live.
A missing page could rewrite a life.
Her heart made a sound like a fist against glass.
Downstairs, a cluster of servants gathered in a hush.
Marta's hands were busy at a linen cart but her eyes slid repeatedly toward the steward's office where Mr. Han gave quiet orders.
Jonas lingered at the fringe like a man who had been told to forget and had only learned to remember haltingly. He flinched when Nyx's footsteps passed.
She did not hide her discovery; secrecy had never saved her.
"Where is the will?" she asked.
The room seemed to contract with a held breath.
Mr. Han's mouth made the efficient line of someone who smoothed trouble rather than named it.
"Mr. Crowe is reviewing the documents at the lawyer's office," he said. "All is under the family's control. There is no cause for alarm."
"Who removed a page?" Nyx asked, her voice sharp enough to cut through air.
Marta hesitated, then Nyx caught the older maid's glance—an animal look, half-pity, half-fear.
Jonas's fingers tightened around his rag. His voice was small.
"I only remember… the tray, and then a hand. A glove. Someone picked something from my coat when I bent down."
Nyx's jaw moved. "A glove?"
Jonas nodded faintly. "Like this," he whispered, mimicking the memory with his trembling hands.
Sebastian Crowe arrived that afternoon with the kind of apologetic smile that smelled faintly of minted paper.
He was the family lawyer: efficient, clipped, and skilled at turning the weight of law into an acceptable rumor.
"Miss Nyx," he said, taking her hand with the businesslike patience of a man who could decide whether curiosity was a category for clients.
"We shall carry out a full inventory. I can reassure you—these matters are to be handled with discretion."
If only words built locks, Nyx thought.
That evening, a plain envelope slid under her door. No return address. No seal.
Inside, one sentence:
Do not dig where the foundation is rotten.
The note could have been a threat. Or an act of mercy.
But the note was not the only thing that moved.
Jonas leaned close that night, his voice a thread.
"They used a key from Mr. Crowe," he whispered. "A private copy. I saw a key slip into his coat."
Sebastian Crowe's name rose in Nyx's head like a bruised coin.
If the lawyer had keys, then the house's locks were nothing but levers in a business of silence.
Night drew a curtain across the estate.
Nyx folded the scraps of paper—the emblem, the note—and held them as if they were a fragile map.
She would not be passive.
If the Valerans wrote her life on the wrong page, she would find the right one.
Dawn would come with more visitors and more polished lies.
But tonight, Nyx had a list:
Find Mr. Crowe's key.Make Jonas brave enough to speak.See Aiden tomorrow.
Somewhere in the estate, a shadow adjusted a cuff and smiled without lips.
The game continued.
But Nyx hadn't yet realized—someone was already rewriting her part in the story.
And this time, it wasn't a missing page.
It was her name.