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The message arrived at the Montague estate on a Tuesday morning.
Not a letter through legal channels. Not financial communication routed through the usual intermediaries. Delivered directly to the estate gate by a courier who gave a false name to the security log and was gone before anyone thought to look twice. Plain envelope. No return address. Inside: a single typed sheet. No signature.
It was not violent. It was designed to feel like a door opening just enough to show you what was behind it. Three weeks of documented movements. Specific locations and specific times, the kind of detail that required sustained observation to produce. The message at the bottom was three sentences. It said, without saying it plainly, that Aldric knew where she was and could continue to know, and that
