Kiss Me Before the Coffin Closes

The candle went out on its own the moment Briar stepped through the door, and no one else in the room seemed to notice. She almost turned around right there. Almost. But the invitation was still folded in her coat pocket, heavy paper embossed in gold, an address with no phone number attached to it, and a name she hadn't seen written down in six years. Ashworth. Her grandmother used to say that name low, like it belonged to someone dangerous, and then change the subject before Briar could ask why. She hadn't told anyone where she was going tonight. There was no one left to tell. Her mother had stopped asking about her work years ago, tired of hearing about relics and estates and clients who never showed their faces. Her grandmother, the only person who might have understood what this invitation actually meant, had been gone since Briar turned eighteen. A man in a dark suit met her at the entrance and didn't bother introducing himself. "You're expected," he said, and led her down a hallway lined with candles that burned without any draft moving them at all. She counted twelve before she stopped counting, unnerved by how still the flames stayed even when she walked directly past them. Four years restoring relics for private collectors had taught Briar not to be impressed by wealth. The Ashgrave Rooms undid that lesson in under a minute. Every surface gleamed like it had never once been touched by ordinary hands. The air smelled faintly of wax and something colder underneath it, stone that had held centuries of cold and refused to give any of it back. Every silence in the building felt deliberate, as though something behind the walls was listening to her footsteps and deciding whether to let her keep walking. "The piece is through here." The man stopped at a pair of doors taller than any door had a right to be, pushed them open, and stepped back without following her inside. The room beyond had once been a nave. Arched ceilings vanished into shadow above her, and stained glass climbed three stories on the far wall, dark now except for a faint bleed of moonlight through the reds. Candles lined the walls in careful rows, and beneath the largest window, resting on a low marble platform, sat the coffin. Briar had handled relics worth more money than her entire family had earned across three generations. Nothing had prepared her for the way her chest tightened at the sight of this particular box. Black lacquered wood. Brass edges gone soft with age. A small cross worn smooth near the foot, as if hands had rested there again and again over centuries. Her grandmother had described a coffin exactly like this one, once, in a rare unguarded moment before the subject got shut down for good. Briar had always assumed it was a story an old woman told to keep a curious granddaughter close to her, nothing more than that. She set her bag down slowly and reached out to touch the wood. It was warm. That shouldn't have been possible. Nothing about a two hundred year old box sitting in an unheated stone room should carry warmth in it, and yet her fingers confirmed it twice before she let herself believe what she was feeling. She pressed her palm flat against the lid, waiting for the sensation to fade the way strange things usually did once you looked at them properly. It didn't fade. If anything, it deepened, like something underneath the wood was pressing back. "You're not supposed to touch that yet." She spun so fast her bag nearly hit the floor. He stood close enough that she had no idea how she'd missed him entering the room at all. Dark hair, a sharp jaw, a black coat cut in a style too old to belong to any modern tailor, though it fit him with a precision that made the thought feel wrong the moment she had it. His eyes were pale gray, and looking into them made her forget for a full second why she'd come here in the first place. "I'm sorry. I didn't realize anyone else was in the room." "I'm aware." He didn't smile, but something in his face suggested her apology interested him more than it should have. "You're the conservator." "Briar Calloway." She held her hand out of habit, then instantly felt foolish for doing it in a room built like a church. He looked at her hand before he looked at her face, as though weighing something before deciding to take it. His skin was cold when their palms finally met, cold enough that her pulse jumped, an odd contrast to the warmth she'd just felt in the wood beside them. "Stefan Ashworth," he said. "This is my family's collection." Her stomach dropped at the name, though she couldn't explain why. She'd seen it written a dozen times in her grandmother's old notebooks, always without context, always trailed by careful notes about hours and dates that had never once made sense to her. "My grandmother worked for your family," she heard herself say. "Eleanor Calloway." Something moved behind his eyes, quick and controlled, gone before she could name it. "I remember her," he said, quieter now. "She was very good at her work." "She never talked about it. Not once." "No," he said. "I imagine she wouldn't have." Before Briar could ask what that meant, wood groaned somewhere behind her, low and slow, like something enormous shifting under its own weight. She turned in time to see the lid had moved. Only an inch. Only enough to prove it had never been sealed the way it should have been. A hand shot past her and slammed flat against the lid, forcing it down. Stefan's hand. "Get back," he said, and for the first time since she'd walked in, his voice cracked with something that wasn't calm at all. Behind him, every candle in the room guttered at once, throwing the whole nave into sudden, breathing dark. And underneath his palm, the coffin knocked once, from the inside.Now it checks out clean across the board.