“Sir, it is not permitted,” stammered the funeral director.
“Open it. Now.” Jack’s voice cracked with fury and fear.
The gravediggers obeyed. Screws clicked. Hinges creaked. The lid lifted.
The satin interior was empty. Jack staggered back, stunned. Then he looked at Tala as if she were the only light left. “Take me to that house.”
Saint Aurelia changed its face when Jack’s convoy left the wealthier districts. Cobbled streets sharpened into alleys of rusted signage and laundry lines. Tala guided them with certainty. “Turn by the bakery with the red door. Go past the bus stop with the peeling mural.”
They stopped before a narrow building with faded blue paint. Jack entered with his security team. The stale smell of old meals clung to the hallway. In the upstairs room they found a thin blanket, a cracked cup, and a silk ribbon embroidered with the initials M H. Jack lifted it, trembling.
“She was here,” he whispered.
A guard called from the stairwell. “Sir. You’ll want to see this.”
Hidden cameras. A crude recording setup. Hours of footage. And in one clip, Mirelle sat on the floor, pale but alive. A man entered the frame carrying food. Jack clenched the edge of the table. He recognized him. Rurik, a former logistics assistant Jack had dismissed months earlier for suspicious behavior.
Before the police could locate Rurik, Jack’s own team traced his phone to a lodge near the foggy outskirts of Ferncrest Woods. They moved fast. When the team stormed inside, Rurik panicked and dropped a suitcase.
“Where is my wife?” Jack demanded.
Rurik sobbed. “She is not here. Someone else took her. I was paid to keep her hidden.”
“Who paid you?”
“A woman called Ysella Fontaine,” he blurted. “She blamed Mirelle for ruining their consulting firm. She said Mirelle deserved to vanish.”
The name hit Jack like a cold tide. Ysella had been Mirelle’s closest collaborator years ago before their partnership collapsed.
On a writing desk they found a journal. Mirelle’s handwriting trembled across the pages. “I am trapped in a place that echoes every sound. Ysella says no one is looking for me. She lies, but sometimes I fear the silence will swallow me.”
Jack shut the journal. “We find her now.”