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Chapter 30

Nora

The windows of Johannes & Grete stared knowingly down at Nora as they approached through empty streets littered with debris from the riots. Knowing she wasn’t here with good intentions.

Most candidates were on their most virtuous behavior during the trials. But breaking and entering to steal birth records wasn’t an ideal demonstration of virtue. And then there was the whole manipulating and lying to her cousin part.

That wasn’t ideal either.

It was closer to dawn than dusk now. The jail cells would be heaving, but the streets were silent. Over the vox, a citywide lockdown had been announced. Anyone seen on the streets before dawn would be summarily arrested.

Obviously, that didn’t apply to Nora and Lotte.

They were challenged once, by two officers marching down the street.

“Stay where you are!” one of the men bellowed as he caught sight of them, raising a charmed weapon. Lotte stopped instantly, but Nora didn’t even break her stride.

“No.” Someone was going to have to show her new cousin what it meant to be a Holtzfall. “Shan’t. We have places to be.”

“Miss Holtzfall.” One of the officers recognized her, his hand going to his companion’s weapon, forcing it down. “You shouldn’t be out. The city is in lockdown.”

“We’re well aware.” Nora didn’t stop walking, leaving the officers no choice but to part for her. “That’s why we’re trying to make our way home, if that’s all right with you.”

“Allow us to accompany you—”

“And take you away from your duty?” Nora said, brushing by the officers. “What would my grandmother make of that ?” They had no choice except to let them pass.

When they were out of earshot, finally she felt Lotte’s shoulders ease. “What if he hadn’t recognized you?”

“Everyone recognizes me,” Nora replied absently. Her gaze flicked back to the officers. She wondered if she would know the cop from the photograph if she saw him. The one who’d stolen her mother’s jewelry. But all of them looked the same to her now, in their gray uniforms.

She would never identify the man who’d taken her mother’s jewelry without Oskar Wallen. She had known that the day he had made her the offer. Ottoline’s father’s name in exchange for the man who had set up Lukas Schuld. She’d just been too stubborn to admit it then.

She had manipulated Modesty into pushing the desire to find her father into Lotte’s head in a low moment. But the ripple of hope that flickered painfully across Lotte’s face when she asked about her father was enough to make Nora feel small.

She told herself it didn’t matter. Lotte wanted to know, so she was helping her. Whatever happened to that information after…But the truth was that if someone offered Nora either of her parents back and it was a manipulation—she would burn that person’s whole life to the ground.

The only small comfort against the guilt slowly climbing through her chest was that she was almost sure this wasn’t a trial in disguise.

Which meant she was just being a bad person on her own time.

The large white office building up ahead was dark. And so were the rest of the windows on the street, as well as the streetlights. The power was out for three blocks.

Several blocks of the city had lost power in the riots, but mostly in lower circles. This one…Nora had asked Leyla to cut all magic to this block. It would be blamed on the protests damaging the power lines. It was actually one of the perks of being the granddaughter of the two most powerful women in the city.

“Johannes & Grete is where every piece of legal information that has ever existed about this family resides,” Nora began telling Lotte as they approached the immense office. “They’re—”

“ Family lawyers operating at the highest level of confidentiality. I know.” Lotte’s arms were wrapped around her elbows uneasily. “My mother sent one of them to get me from the convent.”

Nora scoffed. “Has our grandmother had him fired yet?”

“No,” Lotte said. “She had him ripped limb from limb instead.”

Nora didn’t have time to unpack whether her cousin was joking. They had reached the front door. “Well, we’re not going to get an invitation.” Nora pressed her hand to the door, feeding a small snick of magic to the lasa charm she wore on her hand. The door swung open.

“Don’t worry,” Nora said as she strode inside. “Unless they were smart enough to feed their security charms off a separate power grid, all of their alarms are deactivated.”

“Yes.” Lotte’s voice was dry, but she followed Nora nonetheless. “That was my exact concern. You read my mind.”

Nora scoffed. “Believe me, if I had a gift like mind reading, we wouldn’t be doing this. ” If she had a gift like mind reading, she could simply know the secrets Oskar Wallen was keeping from her. Know why Lukas Schuld was lying. But Justice Holtzfall had been the last mind reader in the family, and that was over a hundred years ago.

Nora had been to Johannes & Grete before, for an introduction as the next Heiress. She had walked down this same long marble hallway, listening to Mr.Grete talk about how his firm had served the Holtzfalls exclusively since the days of Ernest Holtzfall.

Nora realized that Lotte wasn’t following her anymore. She had paused in front of one of the offices. There were three names on the door. Lotte pressed her finger against one. Clarence Brahm. “He’s the man who came to get me,” Lotte said. “He was killed by mechanical wolves on the road.”

“So you weren’t joking.” Nora’s voice carried through the empty building.

“Why would I joke about that?”

“I don’t know you very well. It’s possible you have a dark sense of humor.” But Nora’s gaze was on the name on the door. She had been angry that their grandmother hadn’t told her about Lotte. She’d thought Mercy had done nothing to protect her from this threat to the heirship. But maybe she had tried.

“Our grandmother wouldn’t hurt you, you’re a Holtzfall.” Nora believed that. She wasn’t so sure about her other grandmother though. Leyla Al-Oman had done many things to survive in her time.

“That’s what she said too.” Lotte sounded skeptical. “Whether or not she meant to kill me, she did kill him. He had a wife.”

Nora wondered whether he had children. Instead she said, “And what we have is three hours until the sun rises. Do you want to spend them worrying about a dead man’s wife, or do you want to find your father?”

Nora knew it was contempt for her callousness that she saw in Lotte’s gaze. Good. She didn’t want her cousin to think this charitable act was going to become a habit.

“The records room is at the end of this hallway.” Nora turned away.

The door opened as easily as the first one. For a moment, all they could see was pitch blackness.

Nora flicked her hand, activating the lumen charm she wore as a ring, casting a pool of light. She had thought maybe she only remembered this room as cavernous because she had been smaller last time she was here. She was wrong. It must’ve made up more than half the building, ringed on all sides by cramped and triple-occupied offices. People packed in so there was space for the Holtzfalls’ records.

The marble checkerboard floor made the enormity of the place look like an optical illusion from a magazine. And filling the whole room, row after row of filing cabinets, stretching back before vanishing into the darkness far beyond the small circle of light on Nora’s hand.

“This,” Nora said, her voice seeming to echo around the labyrinth of cabinets, “is every single piece of paperwork ever belonging to our family. Every contract, every deed to every piece of land in Walstad, every debt owed to us. And every record of a Holtzfall birth, marriage, or death.”

“And you think that includes mine?”

“You’re a Holtzfall, aren’t you?”

“Even if my birth record is here,” Lotte said, scanning the room, “there’s no guarantee that it lists my father’s name.”

“There isn’t,” Nora admitted. “But our grandmother tends to be thorough. Here.” Nora extended a lumen charm in the form of a small gold band to Lotte. “This aisle covers the time since our grandmother took power. You take the north end, I’ll take the south, and we’ll work toward the middle.”

Lotte looked at the ring blankly. “Are you bribing me to take the farther end?”

A smart retort was on Nora’s lips, and then she realized Lotte once again wasn’t joking. “Do you not know how to use charms?”

“Why would I know how to use charms?”

“I don’t know.” This, she hadn’t anticipated. “Who doesn’t know how to use charms ?”

Lotte pushed up her sleeve. In the glow of the lumen was a faded scar. “Once, a traveling circus came to town. My friend and I tried to imitate the magician’s card tricks after they left. The Sisters gave me a lash for every card in the deck in punishment. And that was pretend magic.”

Nora’s eyes flicked from the scar up to Lotte’s face. There had been opportunists around the Holtzfall family over the years. Disgruntled siblings of the heir apparent, greedy distant relatives who brought shame to the Holtzfall name. Lotte was far from the first pretender to the heirship to appear over the generations. But for the first time, Nora found herself wondering if Lotte wasn’t trying to take something from them, but get away from something.

With a dramatic sigh, Nora sparked the ring in her hand with magic. “There.” She dropped it into Lotte’s palm. “That should last a few hours at least.” And then she added, “You can get rid of that scar with a charm too, by the way.”

Nora started with the cabinet closest to her. She worked her way through methodically. One after the other. Her mother’s birth records flashed under her hands as she searched. Then Aunt Grace’s.

Valor Holtzfall’s birth and death records.

Holtzfall after Holtzfall. But there was no sign of Ottoline.

Until suddenly, Nora became aware that she wasn’t reading by the light of the ring anymore. Sunlight was filtering through the skylight above. It was dawn, which meant the lockdown would be lifted soon.

“We need to go,” Nora said, moving toward Lotte. “Even I can’t pass this off as an innocent nighttime excursion.”

“We haven’t found anything,” Lotte said, rubbing the heels of her palms tiredly across her eyes.

“We’ll find it tomorrow night.” Nora waved a hand dismissively. She was half disappointed, half relieved. The further she got down this path, the more the idea of selling Lotte’s father’s name to Oskar twisted her stomach. Her mind was tumbling over itself, trying to find another way. Another path to the answer she craved about her mother. “Now, where shall we get breakfast?”