Chapter 263 --263
The jewelry first. Eight bags of it, converted methodically through three separate intermediaries into instruments that connected back to nothing. The clothes had followed. The research materials from the laboratory — her mother’s work, the resonance stones, the unfinished equations on the slate board — packed and moved six weeks ago when she had understood the timeline clearly enough to act on it.
The one bag held what remained.
Documents. The sealed record from the restricted archive. The physician’s folder. The twelve family covenants. The previous princess’s diary. The folded sheet.
She looked at the bag.
Then looked at the secret passage entrance in the east wall.
Not yet.
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The summons had gone out at noon.
Fourteen notes. Her own hand. Her own seal. Delivered through channels that created no record connecting them to each other.
’Come to my office this evening. Bring what you need. Tell no one.’
They had all come.
Mira first, leather satchel, the expression of someone who had understood something was happening before the note arrived. Then Dimitri, ink-stained, one bag, the look of a man who had been quietly preparing for weeks.