Samuel’s POV

The envelope arrived on a Tuesday, unmarked except for my name in an elegant script I didn’t recognize.

Inside was a single sentence: Return to the Kovar estate before the autumn moon wanes. There was no signature, no explanation. Just coordinates I hadn’t thought about in fifteen years.

I told myself I wouldn’t go. I had a life now; respectable, predictable, and safe. But by Thursday I was on a plane to Cluj-Napoca, and by Friday evening I was driving a rented sedan up roads that narrowed with each passing mile, winding through forests that seemed to lean inward, listening.

The Kovar estate materialized from the dusk like...