The first key didn’t look like a death sentence.
It lay in my palm like something out of a fairy tale—ornate brass, teeth like jagged little mountains, the bow cut into a pattern of three interlocking circles. It was warm from my skin, or maybe that was just the lingering heat from the crematorium a few blocks away.
“He really outdid himself,” I muttered to the empty apartment. “One last magic trick, Viktor.”
The other two keys waited on the table, each in its own white envelope with my name written in my father’s slope-precise hand. I’d already opened them, traced the metal, cursed him under my breath until my throat burned. Then I’d done what I always did with anything that smelled like his schemes: I tried to pretend it wasn’t real.
Except there was a note. Of course there was a note.
Mira,
Three keys. Three buildings. Three families.
You can burn them. Or use them.
Whatever you choose, they will come for you.
— V.
No explanations. No apologies. No I’m sorry I was never a father, just your warden. Just a promise disguised as a threat: they will come for you.
A car door slammed on the street below.
I flinched. Stupid. Paranoid. It had been three days since the funeral and nothing had happened. No flowers from faceless men in black suits. No condolences from the powerful “business associates” who had slithered through my childhood like ghosts. The city outside my window had kept pulsing along, neon bleeding into drizzle, sirens wailing, taxis honking.
Three days of silence felt less like mercy and more like a countdown.
I slid the first key into my jeans pocket, folding Vikt— no, Viktor’s note around the cool metal. The compulsion was a physical itch under my skin. If I just saw one of the buildings, one of these supposedly cursed archives, maybe I could decide what to do.
Burn them. Use them. Die trying.
The buzzer rasped through the apartment, shrill and angry.
My heart jumped so hard my vision flashed white at the edges. I stared at the intercom like it had personally betrayed me.
No one buzzed. I didn’t order food. I barely had friends, and the ones I had knew better than to show up unannounced in this part of town.
The buzzer sounded again, longer. More insistent.
I forced my legs to move and pressed the talk button. “Yeah?”
A crackle of static, then a man’s voice, smooth and low, threaded with something that made my neck prickle. “Mira Solberg.” He didn’t ask. He identified. “Open the door.”
Every instinct screamed no.
“Wrong apartment,” I said, thumb already searching for the disconnect.
He laughed softly, like I’d told a joke at a dinner party. “Your father’s building isn’t hard to find. Neither are you. I’m coming up with or without your cooperation. The first option hurts your door. The second hurts you.”
My thumb froze.
They will come for you.
“What do you want?” I asked, hating the way my voice dipped on the last word.
“Conversation.” Another pause, like he was letting the lie sink in. “And a set of keys that don’t belong to you.”
Cold slid down my spine. I hit the release before I could overthink it. Better the devil I could at least see through the peephole than one kicking in my door.
