Chapter 12 — The Hidden Note
736 Words
The attic smelled like mothballs and cedar, dust motes swimming in the beam of my pocket torch. I'd found the key to the attic door in Gareth's study—slipped it from the drawer while he was in a war council, my heart slamming against my ribs so hard I was sure someone would hear it. No one did. No one ever hears the human.
I'd been searching for an hour. Crates of old clothes, furniture draped in white sheets like ghosts, bookshelves warped by moisture. Sera's things were in the back corner, tucked behind a stack of paintings. A small trunk, dark wood, initials S.V. monogrammed into the lid.
*Sera Vance.*
My fingers brushed the wood before I opened it, expecting it to be locked. It wasn't.
Inside: clothes I remembered her wearing. A leather jacket with the collar chewed from where she'd nibble it when nervous. A silver locket—my parents' faces, smiling, before the accident. I pressed it to my lips and tasted copper.
Beneath the clothes, a journal. Dark blue cover, spine cracked from use. I opened it to the middle, torchlight trembling across the pages. Her handwriting. Looping, messy, the letters slanting left because she wrote fast and never cared how it looked.
*Day 14. Gareth is kind. I don't trust kind. Kind is a blade wrapped in velvet. I watch him. He catches me watching. He smiles. I feel like a mouse being coaxed into a trap.*
*Day 23. Mira hates me. She doesn't say it, but her eyes do. When Gareth's back is turned, she looks at me like she's measuring me for a grave. I think she knows why I'm here.*
*Day 47. I found something. Something in the lower crypts. Below the catacombs. They're keeping something down there. Gareth doesn't even know. I'm going back tonight to—*
The page ended.
A rust-colored stain bled across the final words, dark and dried, the paper stiff beneath my thumb. Blood. Sera's blood. The pen had dragged through it, smeared, the last letter trailing off into nothing. She'd been writing when someone found her.
I closed the journal. My hands were shaking.
*They kept her things.*
Gareth could have burned this. He could have destroyed everything, erased her from existence. He kept her jacket. Her locket. Her journal. He kept them in the attic, hidden but preserved, like a shrine no one was supposed to find.
*Why?*
Unless he didn't know they were here.
I turned the journal over in my hands. The lower crypts. Below the catacombs. I'd seen the entrance to the catacombs—iron door in the east wing cellar, bolted with a padlock I could probably pick if I had the right tools. But below them? I hadn't known there was a lower level.
Sera had found something. And someone had killed her for it.
I shoved the journal into my jacket pocket and stood, brushing dust from my knees. The attic was silent except for the creak of old wood settling. I moved toward the door, my footsteps careful, measured—
And stopped.
The door was closed.
I'd left it slightly ajar, a crack of light from the hallway. It was shut now. The handle, old brass, was turning.
I dove behind a stack of crates, pressing myself into the shadows, my breath held so tight my ribs ached. The door swung open. Footsteps. Soft. Deliberate. The shape of a man silhouetted against the hallway light, too tall to be a servant.
He stood at the threshold, not moving. Not speaking. Just looking.
I didn't breathe.
Then he turned, and the light caught his face for half a second.
Viktor.
His eyes swept the room once—slow, methodical—before he pulled the door closed. The latch clicked. His footsteps faded down the hall.
I waited until I couldn't hear them anymore. Then I counted to sixty, slow, before I let myself exhale.
*Viktor was in the attic.*
Looking for something. Looking for me.
I pressed Sera's journal against my chest and felt the weight of it—paper and blood and secrets I was only beginning to understand. Someone was watching. Someone knew I was here.
I slipped out of the attic and back into the darkness of Nightfall Keep, my sister's voice whispering in my ear from beyond the grave.
*Below the catacombs.*
Tomorrow night. I'd go tomorrow night.
- Writer
