[AFYC] Chapter 15
Kathryn descended the stairs unsteadily, her legs feeling like they might give way beneath her. She could see the black carriage that had brought the Marquis through the wide-open door. One of the men following Oscar closely the entire time stepped ahead to open the carriage door for the first time. Oscar boarded with a fluidity that spoke of a man who had completed his business and had no lingering attachments. His conduct exuded the casual indifference of someone who had already accomplished everything he set out to do.
Kathryn hesitated, unable to summon the courage to call out to him. Oscar, who had never shown her the slightest interest, asked as soon as he was seated in the carriage.
“The key.”
“We’re marking it,” Simon replied as he sat across from Oscar in the carriage. The door closed, and the carriage began to move as if it had understood its master’s unspoken command.
As the carriage rolled away, the lights from the mansion grew distant, and Oscar was gradually enveloped in darkness. In the dim light, he seemed almost like a grim reaper shrouded in shadow, perhaps the darkness itself. Simon, sensing the mood, shrank back slightly and held his breath.
The only sound breaking the silence was the rumble of the carriage wheels on the cobblestone road. After a moment, Oscar murmured in the dark.
“Interesting.”
His tone wasn’t sarcastic. Resting his elbow on the window frame and lightly touching his chin, Oscar’s eyes gleamed with a spark of genuine interest.
“Very interesting.”
It had been a day filled with frustration, capped by an unexpected setback from a fool. But just when one door seemed to close, another opened, revealing something entirely unexpected.
It had been a day filled with frustration, capped by an unexpected setback from a fool. But just when one door seemed to close, another opened, revealing something entirely unexpected.
The vault at Felphe Bank, number 5555.
At this point, it was a safety net—useful if opened but not disastrous if it remained shut. However, there was a time when he had been utterly consumed by the need to find that key.
That damned vault had been created in the year his father, the previous Marquis von Reinhardt, had died. The traitor responsible for his father’s death was a former agent of the Reinhardt family.
Codenamed Peter.
The vault numbered 5555 was Peter’s vault.
Peter had once been intimately familiar with how ruthless and relentless his former colleagues could be and how they dealt with traitors. Knowing this, he had taken measures to ensure his survival, secretly creating the vault at Felphe Bank to store whatever means he had devised to prolong his life.
If, at that time, the Reinhardt family had not been leading the charge in the war on behalf of the Luxen royal family, if the Marquis had not perished, if the core agents of the family had not died alongside him...
If there had been anyone else but a six-year-old heir left to carry on the family name... If the only adult left to lead the family, the late Marquis’s wife had not abandoned her son and fled as if she had been waiting for her husband’s death...
If there had been anyone else but a six-year-old heir left to carry on the family name... If the only adult left to lead the family, the late Marquis’s wife had not abandoned her son and fled as if she had been waiting for her husband’s death...
Peter would never have made it off the Norfolk continent alive.
In the end, Oscar had caught him. But then, he lost him.
To be more precise, it was unclear whether Peter had truly been lost. After all, the ship transporting him alive had sunk.
By all accounts, he seemed to be dead.
But at the time, Oscar couldn’t accept that. The circumstances were too dire to let the death of the traitor who had brought his family to ruin remain ambiguous.
He needed concrete proof, not just circumstantial evidence. Moreover, he had been desperate for whatever was in that vault. The Reinhardt family needed the funds it might contain to rise from the ashes.
So he had issued orders—half-desperately—for Peter’s body and the key to be found.
Years passed, but there was no word. Then, about three years ago, a report came in from the agents tracking Peter since his disappearance. The report suggested that Peter had likely drowned with the key in the ocean.
The young Marquis, who had once been desperate to avenge his family, was now nearing his thirties.
Time has changed many things.
The burning desire for revenge on someone who might not even be alive could no longer take precedence over the countless other urgent matters he had to deal with. And the once precious family funds locked in the vault now seemed insignificant to him.
But the documents presumed to be inside that vault...
