Chapter 3
The brass key opened Amelia’s music cabinet.
I had not touched it since she died.
Too much perfume still trapped in the wood.
Too many small objects left exactly where her hands abandoned them.
The key fit a narrow lock beneath the lowest drawer.
A section I never knew existed slid forward.
Inside:
A black cloth.
Six wax impressions.
One photograph.
And a note.
No financial records.
No grand legal secret.
Something older.
More personal.
I unfolded the black cloth.
Each wax impression carried a family signet.
Whitcomb.
Hollingsworth.
Vale.
Bram.
Mercer.
Cole.
Six houses connected to ours for decades.
The photograph showed Percival seated at a long table.
Cordelia beside him.
Four other people.
All six signets pressed into black wax before them.
No Leander.
No Amelia.
On the back, Amelia had written one sentence:
They are building a second table because they cannot control the first.
I sat down.
My bodyguard remained silent.
Good man.
Then I opened Amelia’s note.
Leander,
If you are reading this, Beatrix kept her rabbit long enough.
I stopped.
My wife knew exactly where she would hide the key.
She continued.
Cordelia thinks power becomes legitimate when enough relatives sit around it.
Percival thinks disagreement becomes authority when repeated by old names.
They are both wrong.
The second table exists.
I found it before I got sick.
I did not tell you because I needed to know whether it survived without my attention.
Apparently it had.
Then the final line:
If Cordelia ever humiliates Beatrix in a room full of people, watch who laughs before you watch who speaks.
I read that twice.
My dead wife had predicted tonight’s method.
Not the exact cake.
Not the crown.
The behavior.
Cordelia used cruelty as a loyalty test.
Who would laugh at the boss’s daughter while believing the boss was not watching?
Who would accept Beatrix being made small?
Those people were telling Cordelia something.
They were comfortable with a future where my child—and therefore my authority—could be diminished publicly.
I looked at the six wax seals.
Then remembered the eight guests I had ordered to stay.
Six conspirators.
Eight laughers.
That difference mattered.
Not everyone who behaved badly belonged to the plot.
May you like
And not everyone in the plot necessarily laughed.
I would need truth, not rage.
