POV: Xavier
The watermark haunted him. It pulsed behind his eyes as he stared at the city’s geometric skyline from his office, a ghostly blueprint superimposed on reality. Find the room that remembers. But a room needed a key. The tarnished silver key from the ledger was heavy in his desk drawer. It was a physical answer to a physical lock.His grandfather had used the First Metropolitan Trust. Xavier remembered the smell of polish and anxiety in its vaulted lobby from when he was twelve, brought to witness the solemn unlocking of Elias’s will. The bank is now condos.Where do the boxes go?A call from a blocked line to the bank’s successor, posing as a Hale Holdings paralegal, got a bored answer: contents were transferred to Aethelred Private Vaults for high-value clients. The name was ster
