William Draven Yarrow closes files. Warrants, executions, the parts of supernatural law enforcement nobody wants written down. A coven matriarch dying quietly in her sleep isn't his kind of case. The fight over her chair isn't either, not until somebody turns that fight into cover. One heir turns up dead, and the family's master grimoire goes missing in the same breath. The scene reads like a rival coven settled the succession the hard way, except the signature left behind carries no trace a witch would leave, and that changes who Yarrow's actually looking for. That leaves her brother, Étienne, alone in the house that night, no alibi, and a coven that would rather hand him the blame than sit with the question of who else could have done it. Yarrow's cleared the convenient suspect before. He knows exactly what a grieving family will let itself believe when the truth is harder to face than the easy answer. Covens police their own until they can't. This one ran out of road the night the grimoire disappeared. Somebody's still getting that seat. Yarrow means to find out who paid for it in blood.
