Morning light came thin through the shutters.
Atlas woke to the familiar circle—Lara against his side, Eli's arm across his chest, Clara's quieter presence completing the shape. The residual tension from the previous night still sat under Lara's skin; he felt it in the way her fingers stayed locked around his wrist even in sleep.
Outside, the city had already begun its ordinary noise—cart wheels, a vendor calling prices, the distant clang of a counting-house door.
They rose without hurry. Water. Clean clothes. The same practical order. Clara checked the street through the shutter and went still.
A sealed note waited under the door again, but this one carried the baron's private mark pressed hard enough to crack the wax.
Beside it lay a second message, unsigned, written in a different hand: the baron's wife had been found at first light in a side canal near the warehouse district. Throat cut clean. No struggle marks. No witnesses.
