Chapter 30 - The Unopened Will
"What is that?" I asked, glancing at the thick manila envelope sealed with dark crimson wax.
"It arrived by diplomatic courier thirty minutes ago from the British Embassy," Marcus said, his smile fading into a furrow of suspicion. "Addressed to both Clara and Lauren Mercer. It was processed through the personal estate of your late father."
Lauren set her coffee cup down with a sharp clink. Her eyes locked onto the crimson wax seal.
The seal was not the Mercer family crest. Nor was it the ouroboros of the Dubois dynasty.
It was an intricately carved imperial falcon holding two crossed keys—the personal insignia of the Saint-Germain Trust, an aristocratic banking dynasty that predated every corporate empire on the continent.
Lauren reached out, breaking the wax seal with a trembling fingernail. She pulled out a sheaf of parchment documents accompanied by a handwritten letter written in our father's unmistakable, elegant fountain-pen calligraphy.
She read the first page silently. As her eyes scanned the lines, the color completely drained from her face.
"Lauren?" I whispered, my heart suddenly seizing with a cold premonition. "What did Father write?"
Lauren looked up at me, her hands shaking so violently that the parchment rattled like dry leaves in the wind.
"Clara..." she choked out, her voice barely a whisper that made the hair on my arms stand straight up. "Father didn't flee the Dubois family because he stole money from them."
"Then why did he run?" Marcus stepped forward, his hand instinctively resting on the desk.
Lauren turned the final page toward us. Attached to the yellowed parchment was an official sealed birth ledger dated thirty-two years ago, containing three birth certificates instead of two.
Beneath our names—Clara Mercer and Lauren Mercer—was a third entry, stamped with the seal of a royal ward:
*Triplet Three: Sophia Mercer. Status: Retained by the Trust.*
Attached to the bottom was a handwritten note from Father, scribbled on his deathbed:
May you like
*My daughters: You think you defeated the masters who hunted you. But you only defeated the buyers. The third sister has spent thirty years being raised to replace them. And now that Vivienne Dubois is in chains... Sophia is coming to take what belongs to the crown.*
Outside, in the serene morning quiet of the leafy suburban street, the low rumble of a convoy of black sedans rolled to a halt directly outside our iron gates.