POV: Seren Adaeze
I sat with his card for twenty minutes before I dialed.
Not because I was still deciding. That part was done the moment I found the symbol. I sat with it because I wanted to know the difference between calling because I had no other option and calling because I was choosing to. I needed those to be different things. I needed the second one to be true.
I am still not entirely sure it was.
The card had a direct number, no extension, no assistant buffer. He picked up on the second ring and said nothing, just the sound of someone present, waiting.
"It's Seren Adaeze," I said.
"I know." He did not sound surprised. He did not sound relieved either, which I had half expected and was glad to be wrong about.
I had planned a short version of this, something clean and boundaried. I had the main points in my head. But the prepared version dissolved when I actually heard his voice, so I said the thing underneath it instead.
"I found your family crest."
A pause. Short. "Where."
"On my bedroom wall. I painted it last night without knowing I was doing it." I kept my voice even. "It was at the center of a door, a large one, with a crack down the middle."
He was quiet for a moment that felt careful rather than surprised. "Did the door have light coming through it."
My hand tightened on the phone. "Yes."
He did not explain that. He waited.
"I'll come," I said. "One week, like you said. But I want answers, not just money. Real ones. Not the managed version you gave me in the gallery."
The pause that followed was one beat too long, not long enough to mean he was hiding something simple, long enough to mean the answer was complicated in ways he had already decided how to handle.
"I'll give you what I can," he said.
I sat with that for a second. It was not a yes and it was not a no and it was not even a proper maybe. It was the most precisely honest version of I have limits that I had ever heard from someone who was simultaneously asking me to trust them. I should have pushed. I should have said that was not good enough and held the line until he gave me something more solid.
"Okay," I said instead.
I heard him exhale, not dramatically, just a breath that had been held and was now released. "I'll have someone contact you today about logistics. We leave Saturday."
"I need to sort a few things first."
"Saturday gives you three days."
"I know what day it is."
"Of course." Almost nothing in his voice, but not quite nothing. "Seren."
It was the first time he had used my first name. I noticed this and then immediately tried not to notice it. "What."
"The door you painted, was there anything on the other side of the crack, anything visible."
I thought about the pale painted light, the pressure of it, the way it had felt in the dream like something enormous and patient pressing forward. "Just light," I said.
"Good." He said it quietly, to himself more than to me. "That's good."
"Why is that good."
"Saturday," he said. "I'll explain Saturday."
I put the phone down on the desk and looked at the bedroom wall from where I was sitting. The drawn door was still there, covering everything, the symbol at its center small and deliberate in a way that made it look like a signature, like whatever had used my hands to make it wanted to be identified.
I went to the bathroom and washed my face and looked at myself in the mirror this time, which I had been avoiding. I looked like someone who had not slept properly in four days and had recently stopped arguing with themselves about something. I could not decide if that was an improvement.
I went back to the desk and started a list of what needed handling before Saturday. My Thursday class needed covering. Dami needed a version of the truth she could work with. I needed to figure out what to do about the apartment while I was gone, specifically whether the fact that someone had been inside it once meant they could be inside it again, and whether being away for a week made that better or worse.
I was on the third item when my phone rang.
I picked it up without checking the screen, assuming it was the logistics contact Lucian had mentioned.
The voice was not from any logistics team.
It was a woman, speaking quietly, the way people speak when they are not where they are supposed to be and do not want to be heard.
"Don't go with him."
I went still. "Who is this."
She did not answer that. "The island. You know about the island."
Not a question. She knew I knew. "Who are you," I said again, differently this time.
"That doesn't matter right now." Her voice was low and fast, someone fitting words into a small window of time. "What matters is that you understand what you are agreeing to. He is not lying to you. That's the worst part. Everything he told you is true."
"Then why are you calling me."
"Because true and complete are not the same thing." She stopped. A sound in the background I could not identify. She waited for it to pass. "The last person who saw that island the way you see things, who could read it the way you read things." Another pause. "They didn't come back."
The back of my neck went cold. "What do you mean didn't come back."
"I mean the island kept them." Her voice dropped further. "He knows this. He has always known this. Ask him about 1943. Ask him what happened to the woman who went before you. Ask him before you get on that boat, not after."
The line went dead.
I sat holding the phone in a room that felt considerably smaller than it had ten minutes ago. On the wall ahead of me the painted door covered everything, crack down the center, light pressing through, the Veyne symbol at its heart.
The last person who could read the island did not come back.
And Lucian Veyne, who had spent eighteen months building a careful, careful case for why I was exactly the person he needed, had said not one word about that.
I picked up his card again.