Kiss Me Before the Coffin Closes

Three Weeks

Julian's office sat two floors above the nave, all glass and steel in a building that otherwise refused to acknowledge the current century existed at all. Stefan hated coming up here. He hated the way Julian had arranged everything to look modern and efficient, as if three hundred years of family history could be filed away in a cabinet the same way quarterly reports were. A wall of monitors tracked stock movements and property valuations, the Ashworth holdings reduced to numbers scrolling quietly in green and red, and Stefan had never once understood how his cousin could look at all of it without feeling the full weight of everything those numbers were actually protecting underneath.

"You didn't answer my question downstairs," Julian said, not looking up from his laptop. "Why is it waking for her specifically?"

"I don't know."

"You don't know, or you don't want to know?" Julian finally looked up, and whatever he saw on Stefan's face made his mouth curve into something unkind. "You've spent three centuries building a life around the idea that this family survives by never letting anyone close enough to matter. And in one week, you've let a woman with her grandmother's exact eyes walk straight past every rule you've ever followed."

"She's a conservator. Nothing more."

"Say that again with a straight face and I might believe you."

Stefan said nothing, because Julian wasn't wrong, and there was no version of a denial that would sound convincing coming out of his mouth right now. He crossed to the window instead, looking down at the courtyard where Briar had first stood only a week ago, invitation folded in her coat pocket, no idea yet what she was walking into.

"The board wants the coffin moved to secure storage," Julian said. "Somewhere no conservator, no assistant, no curious granddaughter has any reason to be near it. I've already drafted the proposal."

"You can't move it."

"Watch me."

"It isn't furniture, Julian. It isn't an asset you can relocate because the board finds its behavior inconvenient." Stefan's voice hardened. "Moving it risks waking something none of us are prepared to handle, and you know that."

"What I know," Julian said, standing now, "is that our family has survived this long by controlling variables. You are currently the least controlled variable in this building, and I'm not willing to let three hundred years of careful survival collapse because you've decided to fall in love with the one woman guaranteed to destroy you."

The word landed harder than Stefan expected, mostly because he had no honest way to argue against it. He thought of Briar's face in the candlelight the day before, the way she'd asked questions instead of running, the way she'd looked at him afterward without any of the fear he'd braced himself for.

"I haven't decided anything," he said, though even to his own ears it sounded thinner than he wanted it to.

"You don't need to decide it. It's already happening. I watched you flinch when I mentioned Marguerite's name in front of her. You haven't flinched at that name in decades." Julian's expression softened slightly, the first real c***k in his composure since Stefan had walked in. "I'm not trying to hurt you. I watched what happened last time. I don't want to watch it again."

"Then trust me to handle it differently this time."

"You said that about Marguerite too."

The silence that followed carried more weight than anything either of them had said out loud. Stefan looked away first, toward the window, toward the city lights spread out below them, indifferent to everything happening inside this building.

"Give me until the end of the month," Stefan said finally. "Before you move it. Before the board does anything permanent."

"Why."

"Because if it's waking for her, I need to understand why before anyone touches it. If we move it without knowing what triggered this, we could make everything worse instead of safer."

Julian studied him for a long moment, some calculation working behind his eyes that Stefan couldn't fully read. "Three weeks," he said finally. "Not a day longer. And Stefan, if anything happens to her while you're figuring this out, I will move it myself, and I won't ask permission first."

"Nothing will happen to her."

"You made that same promise about Marguerite, word for word, in this exact room." Julian sat back down, already pulling his laptop toward him again, the conversation apparently closed as far as he was concerned. "I hope you mean it more this time than you did then."

Stefan nodded once, accepting terms he didn't like because he had no better option to offer instead.

He left Julian's office and took the long way back down to the nave, past windows that looked out over a city that had no idea what slept beneath one of its oldest buildings. He passed the portrait gallery on the third floor, faces of Ashworths long dead staring out from gilded frames, none of them smiling, all of them carrying the same guarded expression he saw in his own reflection every morning. He wondered, not for the first time, how many of them had made the same promise to themselves that he kept making and kept breaking, generation after generation, always certain this particular time would be different.

By the time he reached the doors of the nave, his phone buzzed once in his pocket.

A text from Briar. Found something else in Eleanor's notebooks. Can we talk tonight, whenever you have time.

He stared at the message longer than it deserved, weighing every reason he had to say no against the one reason he wanted to say yes, and finding the second reason winning far too easily for his own comfort. Three weeks, Julian had said. Three weeks to understand why the coffin had chosen her before anyone forced his hand.

He typed back a single word, no hesitation left in him by the time he did it. Yes.