The first morning in Alvorenne rose wrapped in fog that obscured everything beyond the wall.
Helena had been awake for hours. Perhaps she had never truly slept—only closed her eyes between one creak and the next, between the snap of a board and the silence that followed, heavier than the sound itself. Twice she had gotten out of bed to check whether the clock in the room was still stopped. It was. But she could not stop hearing those three chimes, repeating inside her skull like an echo that refused to die.
The letter was in the pocket of the coat hanging on the chair. Even without looking, she knew the words were still there. *Trust no one.*
From the window of the old bedroom, the garden revealed itself like a wound. The rosebushes her mother had planted—Helena remembered the leather gloves, the small hands sinking into the earth—were dry, reduced to black branches that looked like twisted fingers. The stone fountain in the center of the flower bed no longer spouted water. Its basin held rainwater and rotting leaves. The gravel paths, once so meticulously maintained that her father could not tolerate a weed out of place, had vanished beneath the overgrowth.
Fifteen years. The house had not merely grown old. It had given up.
Helena descended the staircase slowly, one hand on the mahogany banister. Each step creaked at a different pitch, as if the wood remembered her weight and found it strange.
In the kitchen, Mrs. Celia was already up. The old stove hissed softly, and the smell of fresh coffee was the only thing in the house that seemed to belong to the world of the living. The housekeeper moved with the economy of someone who knew every inch of a place—the cup already set out, the saucer aligned, the sugar bowl pushed toward Helena without the need to ask.
"Did you sleep well?" Mrs. Celia asked without turning around.
Helena sat at the table. It was the same chair she had used as a child. Lower than she remembered.
"I think this house doesn't let anyone sleep in peace."
Mrs. Celia stood still for a moment. Then she poured the coffee into the cup with a slow gesture, as if she needed time to choose her words.
"Many years ago, your mother used to say exactly the same thing."
Her mother's name fell between them like a stone into a still lake. Helena felt her chest tighten. She did not ask anything else. Mrs. Celia did not say anything more. They remained there, each on her own side of the table, drinking coffee in a silence that took the exact shape of everything that could not be said.
Three knocks sounded at the front door.
Helena rose before Mrs. Celia could react. She crossed the hallway, passed through the foyer where white sheets covered the furniture like shrouds, and opened the door.
The man on the porch was tall. His dark hair was parted to one side, with a few strands of gray that did not match his still-young face. He wore a heavy wool coat, his hands in his pockets, and had the posture of someone who had learned to wait without appearing anxious. But his eyes—brown and alert—moved too quickly when the door opened. They swept over Helena's face, the hallway behind her, the foyer. Then they returned to her and fixed there.
"Helena."
It took her two seconds to recognize him. Not by his appearance—by the way he said her name, with that tiny pause before the final syllable, as though her name were a word he had rehearsed.
"Adrian?"
Adrian Voss. The boy who lived in the yellow house at the end of Church Street. The one who climbed the trees in the Valen orchard without asking and took her father's scolding with a smile that never apologized. Fifteen years. The smile had changed—more restrained, more calculated—but it was still there, at the corner of his mouth, like a scar that no longer hurt.
"I'm sorry about your father," he said.
Helena nodded. She did not know what to say about the death of a man she had spent fifteen years trying to forget. Thank you? I'm sorry too? None of the options felt true.
"Come in," was all she said.
They walked through the garden because the house was too heavy for a conversation between two people who were still sizing each other up. The wet weeds soaked Helena's shoes, but she did not care. Adrian walked beside her with his hands still in his pockets, looking at the dead rosebushes, the dry fountain, the wall covered in ivy, as though cataloging the damage.
"Have you stayed in Alvorenne all this time?" Helena asked.
"I left for a few years. Came back five years ago." He paused. "Someone had to stay."
Helena did not answer. The sentence was not an accusation, but it carried the weight of one.
They stopped near the fountain. Adrian took his hands from his pockets. He looked at Helena differently—more directly, more gravely.
"I need to tell you something."
Helena waited.
"Your father came to see me three weeks ago."
The air seemed to grow colder. Helena felt her shoulders stiffen.
"My father came to see you."
"In the middle of the night. He knocked on my door at two in the morning. I barely recognized him. He was thin, with deep circles under his eyes, and his hands were shaking." Adrian spoke slowly, as though reconstructing a scene he still did not understand. "He said that if anything happened to him, I was supposed to help you find the truth."
Helena felt the ground shift beneath her feet, though she stood perfectly still.
"The truth about what?"
"He didn't say. Or he didn't want to say. But he gave me this."
Adrian pulled a small envelope from the inside pocket of his coat, yellowed with age, its edges worn as if it had been hidden and retrieved many times. He held it out to Helena.
She took the envelope. The paper was rough and old. Inside was a single folded sheet. When she opened it, she found no words.
It was a drawing.
A hand-drawn floor plan of the Valen mansion, traced in black ink—the rooms, the hallways, the staircase, the East Wing her father had always kept locked. Each section was labeled in Augusto's small, slanted handwriting. Helena recognized it as readily as she would have recognized a voice.
In one of the rooms—the library—there was a symbol. A circle crossed by a vertical line, marked in red ink that had already darkened to brown. Beside it was a single word, underlined twice:
*Library.*
Helena stared at the drawing. The red ink seemed more recent than the rest. As if her father had added it afterward, urgently, in fear.
She opened her mouth to say something, but a crash interrupted her.
The sound came from inside the house. Deep and muffled, as if something heavy had collapsed onto the floor. The birds in the oak trees took flight all at once.
Helena and Adrian looked at each other for a moment—the exact length of a breath—and ran.
The front door was still open. The hallway was empty. The smell of coffee still lingered in the kitchen, but Mrs. Celia was not there. Helena took the stairs two at a time, Adrian right behind her.
The library door stood wide open.
Inside, chaos.
Books covered the floor, dozens of them, ripped from the shelves with a violence that had nothing to do with an accident. The oak bookcases—heavy, bolted to the wall—were intact, but empty, like open mouths. The Persian rug was folded over itself, the desk shoved aside. The back window was banging against its frame, thrown wide open, and the wind carried in the smell of wet earth and leaves.
Helena entered slowly. The window glass was not broken. Someone had opened it from inside.
Adrian crouched beside the desk. There was something there—a scrap of paper held beneath the weight of a bronze blotter. He pulled it out carefully and read it in silence. Then he looked up at Helena.
"What does it say?" she asked.
He held out the paper.
The handwriting was different from the letter from the night before. More hurried, more uneven, as though the hand that had written it were trembling or had been in too much of a hurry to take care. But the ink was the same. And the message was short:
*You arrived too late.*
Helena held the paper in both hands. She looked at the open window, the scattered books, the empty space on the shelves where something—a book, a box, a secret—had been only minutes ago.
Whoever had been there knew they would come. Knew about the map. Knew about the library.
And had arrived first.
Outside, the fog swallowed the garden. Helena stood amid the fallen books, her father's map in one hand and the intruder's message in the other, and for the first time since she had stepped off the train, she felt something beyond exhaustion and resentment.
She felt afraid.