The second letter arrived without wax.
That was how we knew it had passed through too many hands.
Ren found it inside the Warm Things notebook.
Not between pages.
Inside the cover.
A line had been cut under the inner binding, thin enough to miss unless one had spent years checking whether noble children hid apology notes, poison slips, or gambling debts in books meant to look harmless.
Ren had checked the notebook because he checked everything now.
The note slid out like a black tongue.
Seraphina went still.
The Warm Things notebook lay on the recovery room table, open to Hana's first page.
Hana.
She laughed at bad tea.
She said warm things should be kind if the world was not.
She hated hospital lights.
She tapped cups twice.
Under those words, a second hand had written in black ink.
Warm things rot when kept near dead names.
For one second, I did not move.
Not because I was calm.
Because something in me had gone very far away.
The room blurred around the edges.
