The Thirteenth Rule

CHAPTER 5: THE PRICE OF KNOWING

JANE, ALONE

Jane hadn't heard from Kelvin in three days.

No call. No message. Not even the cold, formal kind he used to send when he wanted something handled and didn't want to ask in person. The silence said more than anything he could have written.

She'd gone looking for the stranger who'd sold her the packet — back to the corner where she'd first met him, the bar he'd mentioned once in passing, the number that, when she finally worked up the nerve to call it, rang twice and disconnected.

Nobody she asked had heard of him. Nobody she asked even remembered seeing him.

It was as if she'd bought the packet from someone who didn't exist.

Jane sat in her apartment that night with the lights off, the way she imagined Kelvin might be sitting in his — except she doubted his silence came from guilt. Hers did. It sat in her chest like something she'd swallowed and couldn't bring back up.

She didn't try calling him again.

THE LOCKED WING

Kelvin found Lisa in the garden, not the kitchen this time, sitting on the low wall near the east hedges with her knees drawn up, somewhere she clearly thought no one would look for her.

"I need to see it," he said, without greeting her first. "The room. Whatever you found."

Lisa looked up at him for a long moment. "You said that wing wasn't open to staff."

"It isn't open to anyone. That's the point."

She studied him, the same careful study she'd given him in the kitchen, except this time she wasn't deciding whether to lie. She was deciding whether to trust him.

"Okay," she said.

They went together after the staff had gone to bed, down the same dark hallway, past the same heavy doors. The study door was shut now, fully, the way it hadn't been the first time.

"It was open before," Lisa said quietly.

"It isn't anymore." Kelvin tried the handle anyway. Locked.

He didn't ask how she'd gotten in the first time. He suspected, by now, that some doors in this house only opened for the people they wanted to let through, and he didn't like what that implied about himself.

He found another way — an old key from his father's desk, one he'd never had a reason to use until tonight.

THE PORTRAIT, TOGETHER

Inside, Lisa watched Kelvin's face as he found the portrait.

He didn't flinch the way she had. He went very still instead, the kind of stillness that looked calm from a distance and felt, up close, like something barely held in place.

"That's not possible," he said.

"I thought the same thing."

"Born 1891." His voice had gone flat. "Lost, 1923."

"There's a page in that case." Lisa pointed without getting too close to it again. "I could only read part of it. Something about the condition not skipping. That it waits."

Kelvin crossed to the case and read it himself, slowly, his jaw tightening with every line he understood and every line he didn't.

"My father never mentioned this," he said. "Neither did the matriarch. And she mentions everything that benefits her to mention."

"Maybe that's the point," Lisa said. "Maybe it only benefits her if you don't know."

Kelvin looked at her then, really looked, the way he hadn't allowed himself to since the night she'd held his wrist steady and hadn't run.

"You could have told me you found this," he said. "Days ago."

"I didn't know if I could trust what you'd do with it."

"And now?"

Lisa held his gaze. "Now I think you're as lost in this as I am."

Something in his expression loosened, just slightly — not relief, not yet, but the absence of the wall he kept up with almost everyone else.

"Whatever this is," Kelvin said quietly, "I don't think either of us gets to walk away from it now that we know."

"I know."

"That's the part nobody warns you about. Knowing isn't free."

THE PRICE

They didn't hear the footsteps until they were already close.

Lisa reached the door first and eased it shut as far as it would go without latching, the same instinct from before, except this time Kelvin was the one standing beside her in the dark, both of them holding still while the footsteps slowed, paused outside, and didn't move on.

A long beat passed.

Then a voice — older, composed, unmistakably in charge — spoke from the other side of the door.

"You can come out," the matriarch said. "I've known you were both in there since you picked the lock."

Kelvin's jaw tightened. Lisa felt his hand find her wrist in the dark, not gripping, just there, the way it had been that first night — except this time it was steady, and so was she.

"We're not leaving until you tell us what's in this room," Kelvin said through the door.

A pause. Then, quieter than either of them expected:

"I was wondering when you'd finally ask."

END OF CHAPTER 5