The Will

Settling III

Lily POV

Mr. Bennett led us down the east wing corridor with the efficiency of someone who had performed the same task hundreds of times before.

I paid attention.

Not because I cared about the decor, though there was certainly plenty to observe. The walls were lined with landscapes in gilded frames, each illuminated by antique sconces that cast soft pools of amber light across the floor.

No, I paid attention because information mattered.

The ballroom sat one floor below us. The east staircase emptied into a central hallway. Eight visible exits. One security camera near the landing. Another at the far end of the corridor.

Dally's room came first. Mine was directly beside his. Across the hall, Gunnar occupied the larger corner suite overlooking the lake.

Ayla's room sat next to his.

Interesting.

Intentional, almost certainly.

Nothing Keenan Ashwood ever did was accidental.

Mr. Bennett handed me a brass key. "Your room, Miss Bishop."

I thanked him, stepped inside, and I immediately cataloged the space.

Approximately seven hundred square feet. Fireplace. Desk. Private sitting area En suite bathroom. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, though only half-filled.

I unpacked efficiently. Laptop on the desk. Medication organizer in the bathroom. Toothbrush beside the sink. Notebook in the top drawer of the nightstand.

External organization often compensated for internal chaos.

At least for me.

Five minutes later, I stood in the center of the room with nothing left to do. The silence pressed in around me. Too much silence had always been dangerous.

I glanced at the clock. Eight forty-three. Too early to sleep. Too late to start knocking on strangers' doors. Besides, there was only one place in this house I genuinely wanted to see again.

The library.

I found it exactly where I remembered: At the end of the west corridor, tucked behind a pair of carved oak doors.

The room beyond stole my breath in precisely the same way it had when I was sixteen. Three stories of bookshelves stretched toward a painted ceiling. Rolling ladders lined the stacks. Leather chairs sat in conversational clusters around stone fireplaces. The shelves curved along a second-floor gallery connected by narrow iron walkways.

Thousands of books. No. Tens of thousands.

For a moment, the knot in my chest loosened.

The scent hit me next. Old paper. Dust. Leather bindings. A trace of cedar polish. Libraries smell like memory. Like possibility. Like the accumulated weight of human curiosity.

I stepped farther inside and ran my fingers lightly across a shelf. History. Economics. Mathematics. Philosophy.

Keenan's collection had always reflected the way his mind worked. Omnivorous. Restless. Obsessed with understanding how systems functioned.

I used to lose entire weekends in this room.

Back then, he would sit in one of the armchairs by the fire while I solved chess problems or worked through advanced proofs.

He never praised intelligence directly. He rewarded results. The distinction mattered.

I wandered deeper into the stacks.

The library felt larger than I remembered.

Perhaps grief distorted scale.

The house had changed overnight. Not physically. Functionally.

Every room now existed in two versions simultaneously. The place it had been when Keenan was alive., and the place it had become after his death.

I paused beside a shelf devoted entirely to cryptography.

Of course. Even here. Especially here.

A dead billionaire had gathered four strangers beneath his roof, trapped us together for six months, and tasked us with solving his murder.

The others would be grieving. Or celebrating. Or panicking.

I was standing in a library.

Because somewhere in this room, I suspected, Keenan Ashwood had already left us a clue.