No one moved.
The word *killed* still hung in the room like the final chord of something that could not be undone. Helena felt its weight on her shoulders, in her chest, at the base of her throat—as if someone had poured liquid lead into her body and now expected her to remain standing.
“My mother,” Helena said. Her voice came out low and controlled, but her hands, braced against the edge of the table, were trembling. “My mother died in a fall. On the East Wing staircase. I was twelve when it happened. Everyone in Alvorenne said it was an accident.”
Ramires did not look away.
“Everyone in Alvorenne lied.”
The silence that followed was different from the others. It was not the house’s silence—that old silence, accustomed to itself. This was a new silence, sharp enough to cut the air between the four of them like an invisible blade.
Helena looked at Adrian. He stood motionless in the doorway, his arms crossed, his jaw clenched. He did not look surprised. He looked like someone who had just heard aloud something he had suspected for a long time.
“My father knew,” Helena said, turning to Ramires. It was not a question.
“Your father spent twenty years trying to prove it.” Ramires opened the leather folder with the same methodical fingers as before, but Helena noticed that his precision was different now—slower, more careful, as though the contents of that folder could burn him. “He came to me six months ago. He was different. Thinner, quieter. He said he had gotten too close and needed to make sure that, if anything happened to him, the investigation would not die with him.”
Ramires took out a sealed envelope bearing the Valen family seal—a V intertwined with oak branches, pressed into dark wax. Helena recognized the seal. Her father used it for correspondence he considered too important to merely sign.
“This is the will. Written in his own hand.”
Helena took the envelope. The paper was thick and stiff, with the kind of texture that could survive decades inside a drawer. She broke the seal with her thumb. The wax split into two pieces that fell onto the table like tiny bones.
Inside was a single sheet. Her father’s handwriting—the same small, slanted script as on the map, the same one she recognized the way she recognized a voice.
*My dearest daughter,*
*If this letter has reached you, it means I failed. I could not protect you from the truth, and I could not find it on my own.*
*The family fortune is not the most important thing. It never was. The true legacy of the Valens is what happened that night—and what we did to hide it.*
*Trust no one. The person responsible for your mother’s death is still in Alvorenne. They are close. They always have been. And they will do anything to stop you from discovering who they are.*
*Look for the bronze key. It will open the first of the many secrets this house keeps.*
*Forgive me for not being stronger.*
Helena read it twice. The second time, the letters blurred. It was not tears—her entire body was refusing to process what she was reading. Her father asking for forgiveness. Her father admitting weakness. Her father, who had never said a word about her mother after the funeral, who had locked the East Wing and forbidden anyone from mentioning her name, who had turned grief into silence and silence into a wall—this father had written *forgive me*.
Helena closed her eyes. Breathed. When she opened them, the room was in the same place, but she was not.
The bronze key was in her coat pocket. Helena had felt it there ever since she put it away—the strange weight, disproportionate to its size, as if the key knew it was important. She took it out and placed it on the table beside the letter.
Ramires looked at the key. Something changed in his face—a tiny fracture in that lawyerly composure, a widening of his eyes that lasted less than a second.
“So he managed to hide it,” he murmured.
Adrian pushed away from the doorway.
“You know what this key opens?”
Ramires hesitated. Helena saw the hesitation—not in his lips, which remained closed, but in his hands, which drew back over the folder as if protecting a vulnerable side.
“Augusto mentioned a room. A space that does not appear on the mansion’s original floor plan.” Ramires chose his words like a man crossing a minefield. “He believed the evidence was there. But he never told me where it was. He only said the key would know.”
Helena was about to answer when the lights went out.
All of them. At once. As if someone had pulled the entire mansion off the power grid.
Darkness fell over the room with the weight of something solid. Helena felt the air change—colder, denser, as if the walls had drawn closer. She heard Adrian’s breathing to her left, quick and controlled. She heard Ramires snap the folder shut. And she heard something else.
Footsteps upstairs.
Not Mrs. Celia’s dragging steps. These were quick, purposeful, carrying the urgency of someone searching for something—or someone running away.
Then came the scream.
High-pitched, short, cut off halfway through as if a hand had covered the mouth of whoever was screaming. It came from the second-floor hallway—from the direction of the East Wing.
Helena ran.
She did not think. Her body decided before her mind could. She crossed the room in the dark, struck her hip against the corner of a chair, found the staircase railing by touch, and climbed. The steps creaked beneath her feet like warnings she ignored. Adrian was right behind her—she could hear his breathing, his footsteps heavier and longer.
The second-floor hallway was pitch-black. Helena moved forward with one hand against the wall, feeling the wallpaper beneath her fingers—the worn relief, the seams, a picture frame. Her eyes began to adjust. Shadows took shape. Closed doors. The carpet beneath her feet.
She found Mrs. Celia on the floor, leaning against the wall a few yards from the East Wing staircase. She was conscious, but her face was the same waxy color it had taken on when she saw the photograph. Her eyes were wide, fixed on a point on the opposite wall, and her right hand trembled in the air, pointing.
“Mrs. Celia.” Helena knelt beside her. “What happened?”
The housekeeper did not answer. She kept pointing.
Helena turned.
On the wall, written in large, uneven letters with something that ran and gleamed in the dark—fresh red ink, carrying the metallic smell of something that was not only ink—was a sentence:
*Stop looking... or you’ll be next.*
The letters dripped. Red drops ran down the wall and gathered along the baseboard like the tears of something wounded.
Adrian reached Helena’s side. He stood still, staring at the wall, and Helena saw his jaw clench again—not in surprise, but in anger.
“This was written just now,” he said. “The ink is still wet.”
Helena stood. She looked down the hallway—at the closed doors, at the shadows that could conceal anything, at the East Wing staircase vanishing into the darkness like an open mouth.
Whoever had written it could still be there. A few yards away. Breathing the same air.
The lights came back on.
All at once, just as they had gone out. The hallway was revealed—empty, silent, with its doors closed and its carpet undisturbed. No footprints. No marks. Only the sentence on the wall, red and dripping, and Mrs. Celia on the floor, her hands finally still.
Helena looked at the housekeeper. Looked at Adrian. Looked at the sentence on the wall.
Then she looked at the bronze key, which she was still holding in her left hand without realizing it—gripping it so tightly that the spirals on its handle had left marks in her palm.
Someone did not want her to find what the key opened.
And that someone was inside the mansion.