The scraping sound pulled at her again, a phantom claw dragging its nails through her concentration. Drizella's fingers tightened around the iron poker she'd lifted from the parlor hearth. Third time tonight. Too deliberate to be rats.
She traced the noise to the east wing, where warped floorboards creaked beneath her careful steps. The sound grew sharper here - metal on wood, rhythmic and purposeful. Through the darkness, she made out the outline of her father's old office door, its surface scarred by crude boards nailed across its frame in a lopsided X.
Mother sealed this room the day after the funeral. Drizella pressed her palm against the wood, collecting splinters and decades of grime. The door's surface felt wrong - not just weathered, but actively decaying. Dry rot had turned the oak panels soft as peat moss.
She wedged the poker's hooked end beneath the lowest board. The nails screamed as she levered them free, each metallic shriek setting her teeth on edge. Rust flakes rained down, coating her sleeves in red-brown powder. The second board took more force, requiring her to brace one foot against the doorframe for leverage.
The final board snapped with a crack that echoed through the empty hallway. Drizella froze, counting heartbeats. One. Two. Three. No running footsteps. No shouts of alarm. The house remained as silent as a tomb.
The door's brass handle had corroded into a solid mass of verdigris. She attacked it with the poker's tip, scraping away layers of green until the mechanism grudgingly turned. The hinges protested with a sound like dying birds.
A wall of stagnant air struck her face - thick with mold spores and the chemical sweetness of decay. Drizella yanked her sleeve over her nose, but couldn't completely block out the assault. Her eyes watered as she edged into the office.
Moonlight filtered through the dirt-streaked skylight, painting everything in shades of ash and bone. Papers carpeted the floor in drifts, their edges dark with water damage. The leather spines of ledger books had split and curled like dead leaves. A massive mahogany desk dominated the center of the room, its surface buried under collapsed ceiling tiles.
The scraping sound came again - sharper now, emanating from behind a towering bookshelf that listed dangerously to one side. Drizella approached it carefully, testing each floorboard before putting her full weight down. The shelving unit's frame had rotted where it met the baseboard, creating a gap just wide enough to see movement in the darkness beyond.
Something's in the wall. She wedged the poker into the gap and pulled. The bookshelf's joints crackled like kindling, showering her with splinters and chunks of deteriorated wood. The entire structure shifted with a groan. Drizella threw herself backward as it toppled, hitting the floor with an impact that shook dust from the ceiling.
Behind where the bookshelf had stood, a rectangular section of wall paneling had been cut away and poorly replaced. Fresh scratch marks scored the edges of the makeshift door - the source of the sounds that had drawn her here. Someone had been trying to get inside.
Her hands trembled as she pried the panel free. The space beyond was barely larger than a bread box, containing a single object: a lead-lined strongbox, its surface etched with the symbol of a quill wrapped in thorns.
The scraping sounds had stopped. In their place, she heard something worse - the subtle creak of weight shifting on the skylight glass above her head.
The iron poker struck wood with surgical precision, each impact calculated to minimize noise while maximizing damage. Drizella worked methodically across the bookshelf's surface, mapping its structural weak points through decades of rot. Dust motes swirled in the moonlight streaming through the broken skylight, carrying the acrid smell of mildew and something darker - the metallic tang of old blood beneath the floorboards.
Seven nails on the left side. Four on the right. The shelf wasn't meant to be removed. Her fingers traced the deliberate pattern of the attachments, ignoring the splinters that bit into her skin. The shelving unit had been anchored directly into the wall studs - far more secure than necessary for mere books.
She wedged the poker's hook beneath the lowest shelf, using her weight as leverage. The wood groaned in protest, then gave way with a crack that seemed to shake the entire east wing. Drizella froze, counting heartbeats, listening for footsteps in the corridor. Only silence answered.
The second shelf proved more stubborn. She braced one foot against the wall, muscles trembling with effort as she worked the poker deeper into the gap. Sweat trickled down her spine, soaking through the fine fabric of her dress. When this shelf finally surrendered, it sent her stumbling backward, barely catching herself before she could crash into Father's desk.
Behind the demolished woodwork, moonlight caught something that didn't belong - a gleam of dull metal where there should have been only plaster. Drizella pressed her palm against the wall, feeling the subtle difference in temperature. Lead. They lined it with lead. The lockbox was smaller than she'd expected, barely larger than a ledger book, but surprisingly heavy when she worked it free of its hiding place.
The box bore no maker's mark, only a single symbol pressed into the metal: a quill wrapped in thorns. The same symbol she'd seen on those coded correspondence sheets, the ones that had vanished from her father's study the night after his funeral. Her fingers found the catch mechanism, surprisingly well-maintained despite its age. They've been maintaining this. Someone's been accessing it regularly.
The lid opened with a soft click that seemed to echo in the stillness. Inside, carefully preserved beneath a sheet of oilcloth, lay a stack of documents. The topmost bore her father's signature - not the flowing script he used for social correspondence, but the tight, precise hand he reserved for legal matters. Beneath it, she caught glimpses of shipping manifests, insurance claims, and letters bearing the royal seal.
Proof. Real, tangible proof. Her hands shook as she lifted the first document, holding it up to catch the moonlight. The dates aligned perfectly with the suspicious pattern she'd uncovered in the trade records - massive insurance payouts for cargo that had supposedly been lost at sea, but had actually been...
A scrape of leather on glass above her head shattered her concentration. Drizella's head snapped up toward the skylight, the document nearly slipping from her trembling fingers. I'm not alone.
She forced herself to move slowly, deliberately, sliding the papers back into their lead sanctuary. Each motion measured, each breath controlled, she eased the box closed and tucked it against her chest. The weight of it pressed against her bruised ribs, a solid reminder of what she stood to lose if she made a single wrong move now.
Don't run. Running makes you prey. She kept her steps even as she backed toward the door, the iron poker still gripped white-knuckled in her other hand. The moonlight threw strange shadows across the demolished bookshelf, and somewhere in the darkness above, something - or someone - waited.