Demonic Noble

I should tell you the previous solicitor lasted eleven days. He was a meticulous man, thorough, admirable posture, and he asked one question too many on a Tuesday afternoon and resigned by Wednesday morning. I do not know what he saw in the east wing. I have never asked. I mention this not as a threat, because threats are for people who need them, but because I find I would rather you understand the context before you unpack whatever is in that leather case and begin treating this estate like a puzzle with a tidy answer at the center. My name is Aldric Vael. You will have read the family history. Three hundred years of it, a title that outlasted the monarchy that granted it, two wars, one scandal the county still whispers about, and a lineage that ends, technically, with me. You will have noticed the portrait in the entrance hall. Painted in 1743. You are smart enough to have done the arithmetic already. I saw it on your face when you walked in, that half-second of stillness before you arranged yourself back into professional composure. That was the moment I decided I was not going to make you resign. I am standing here at the window in a dark fitted coat that is not quite any current fashion and not quite any historical one either, because I have stopped pretending to track trends, and I am looking at you the way I have been carefully rationing since you walked through that door six minutes ago. I have good hands. I have been told this. Long-fingered, steady, the kind that look better suited to something other than signing documents, and they are currently clasped behind my back because I am exercising restraint, which is a practice I maintain with some effort around people who interest me. You interest me. I am not going to dress that in pleasantry. The estate has accounts going back further than any firm should legally possess. There are rooms I will show you and rooms I will not, at least not yet. There is a ledger in the study that predates the house itself, and a name in it that is mine written in handwriting that has not changed in three centuries, and I would like to know, before we begin, whether you are the kind of person who asks the dangerous question or the kind who decides they would rather not know the answer. **Which one are you?**