The seal was already descending when Elin placed her hand on the edge of the parchment.
Across the wooden table, Lord Viktor stopped. Beyond his shoulder, a strip of black cloth stirred beside the chapel door. Only a day earlier, he had stood inside that chapel and said goodbye to his only son.
Now he was about to take the sisters’ home.
Elin looked straight at him. “Your son is alive.”
The seal struck the bare table with a sharp knock.
“I buried him yesterday.”
Mara turned toward her sister. Her expression was not disbelief. It was the fear of someone hearing a secret spoken in the one place it should never have been mentioned.
Elin glanced at the chapel, then back at Viktor.
“Then open his coffin.”
Mara stepped closer and gently caught her sister’s forearm.
“You promised to keep quiet.”
Viktor’s gaze moved from Elin to Mara. For the first time that afternoon, the parchment between them no longer mattered.
The question Mara could not avoid
“What did she promise?” Viktor asked.
Mara loosened her grip. She had imagined this moment through two sleepless nights: the lord’s anger, the guards, the accusation that would follow. Yet none of those imagined scenes had prepared her for the hope he was struggling not to show.
“If we are wrong,” she said, “you may send us away. But look first.”
Viktor left the confiscation order unsigned. He called for Bram, his captain of the guard, and ordered him to bring a lantern and the keys to the family crypt.
At the chapel entrance, Konrad appeared with the familiar brass keys at his belt.
“My lord, the burial has already been completed.”
“Then you will have no difficulty showing me what you sealed.”
Konrad looked briefly toward Mara. Elin noticed. So did Viktor.
What lay beneath the lid
The crypt smelled of cold stone and extinguished candles. Bram set the lantern on a ledge and approached the coffin. Konrad remained near the doorway.
Viktor had been told that the fire had left his son beyond recognition. He had accepted a closed coffin because the man who managed his household had begged him to remember Adrian as he had been.
Now that kindness sounded different.
Bram broke the seal and raised the lid.
There was no body.
A dark cloak lay rolled upon the lining, arranged to give the impression of weight beneath the cloth. Viktor stared at it without moving. Then he reached inside and pressed his hand against the empty place where his son should have been.
“You sealed this,” he said to Konrad.
The steward’s composure tightened. “I arranged what I was instructed to arrange.”
“By whom?”
Instead of answering, Konrad pointed at Mara.
“Ask her why she was here after dark.”
Why the sisters had remained silent
Mara did not deny it. Elin turned toward her, waiting. She knew Adrian had survived; she had seen enough to be certain. But her sister had never told her the whole story, or where he had gone.
“Yes,” Mara said. “I was here.”
Viktor stepped away from the coffin. “Where is my son?”
For a moment, Mara watched Konrad instead of the lord. The steward was standing very still.
“I hid him.”
The words changed the silence in the crypt. Viktor’s grief had somewhere to go now, but so did his anger. Elin’s fingers slipped from her sister’s sleeve.
“You knew where he was all this time?” she whispered.
Mara nodded.
“Then take me to him,” Viktor said.
“I will. But not with everyone in this room.”
Konrad’s keys made a small metallic sound as his hand closed around them.
The empty coffin was only the beginning
Viktor ordered Bram to stay beside Konrad while Mara led him out of the crypt. Elin followed. Above them, the evening light was fading from the chapel windows.
The sisters had come to save their home. Instead, they had exposed a false burial inside the lord’s own household.
Adrian had survived. That much was no longer a question.
What Viktor did not yet know was why his son had allowed him to grieve—and why Mara believed that bringing Adrian home could put him in danger again.
To be continued: Part 2 — The Empty Coffin.