Blood in the Box

The bank had marble floors and hushed voices. A clerk led them to the vault, and Rosalind's hand shook so badly on the small brass key that Isla had to help her turn it.

Inside: a stack of yellowed papers, a photograph, and a folded certificate soft as fabric from being read a thousand times.

Isla unfolded it first.

Certificate of Birth. Name: Rosalind Anne. Father: Alaric Corvin.

She read it three times, because some sentences refuse to be understood on the first pass.

"Alaric Corvin," she said. "That's —"

"Dorothea's husband. Yes." Rosalind's voice was stripped to bone. "I wasn't the housemaid's daughter they let everyone believe. I was his. An affair, before he married her. He kept me close for years — quietly, a secret fondness he indulged when it cost him nothing. Then Dorothea found this same certificate, hidden exactly where I just hid it again. And I became a problem that needed solving."

"You're his daughter." Isla's voice was barely a whisper. "Which makes you —"

"Dorothea's stepdaughter, legally nothing. Sebastian's aunt, biologically." Rosalind allowed a small, humorless smile. "And you, Isla, are a Corvin. Whether any of them ever admit it or not."

The photograph slid out — a younger Alaric, arm around a laughing teenage Rosalind, and behind them, half in shadow, Dorothea watching with an expression Isla now recognized. She'd seen it two nights ago, on a marble staircase, aimed at her.

"They didn't just cut you off," Isla said slowly. "They erased you. Renamed you. Paid you to vanish so nobody would ever explain a Corvin heir born on the wrong side of a marriage."

"Yes."

"And now they're funding my scholarship."

"Guilt money," Rosalind said. "Or insurance. I've never been sure which."

Isla's phone lit up on the vault table — an email from an address she didn't recognize, subject blank, sender listed only as W. Pruitt, Corvin Family Trust.

She hadn't given anyone this email address.