THE LATE DUKE’S WILL

I let that silence stretch long enough, then turned to call for Greta, who had been standing quietly by the door since the start of the evening.

“Greta, would you repeat for the council what you told me this morning?”

Greta stepped forward, bowing slightly, but her voice was clear.

“My lords and ladies, four months ago, Lady Sophie came to me asking very detailed questions about Duke Ashfeld’s daily schedule — what hours he was usually alone in the library, which wine he preferred, which path he liked to walk in the garden. At the time I thought nothing of it, assuming she was simply curious. But afterward, I noticed she always appeared in exactly those places, at exactly those hours, every day, for nearly four months — before what happened in the orange grove.”

I produced a small bundle of letters, tied with an old ribbon — something Greta had found in Sophie’s room that morning, with my permission.

“These are letters Sophie sent to a friend in Vienna over the past four months. I’d like to read one passage aloud, dated three months ago.” I opened the letter and read slowly: “‘Isabelle has had everything since birth — a title, an engagement, a man willing to marry her even without love. I’ll show her how easily I can take away the very thing she thinks is hers by right.'”

A sharp intake of breath sounded somewhere in the room.

Sophie stood frozen, her hand still gripping Konrad’s arm but loosening by the second, her face draining from fragile to pale.

“That… that was just something said in anger,” she stammered, “it doesn’t mean I actually—”

“Four months of tracking his schedule, exactly as you wrote in your own letter — that’s not a moment’s impulse, Lady Sophie,” Greta said, her voice still calm but unyielding.

There was a short silence, and then something in Sophie seemed to snap.

She let go of Konrad’s arm entirely and straightened up — no more leaning, no more fragility.

Her face took on an entirely different expression: cold, sharp, and full of bitterness.

“Fine, then I’ll tell the truth.” Her voice hardened, all trembling gone.

“Yes, I planned it. Since I was ten years old, I watched you be loved, watched an entire family kneel in celebration for you, while I was just the charity case, forced to bow and thank everyone for a hand-me-down dress, a seat at the far end of the table. Did you think I owed you a lifetime of gratitude for that? I’m sick of having to be grateful!” She lifted her chin, looking at me with eyes stripped of all pretense.

“Konrad was simply the first thing I saw worth taking from you. I don’t regret planning it — I only regret that you found out so soon.”

The room fell utterly silent at the sudden shift — as if a layer of skin had been peeled away all at once, revealing what had lain hidden beneath for eighteen years.

Konrad, standing beside her, showed for the first time that night a genuine falter — not out of pity for me, but because even he hadn’t expected the woman he’d just publicly declared true love for to also confess, in the same breath, that the whole thing had been a calculated game from the start.

But a second later, he clenched his jaw, put his usual air of superiority back on, and took Sophie’s hand as though nothing unusual had happened at all.

“Regardless,” he said, his voice still hard, “I still choose to stand by her.”

No one on the council answered that with a sympathetic look anymore.

In the silence that remained, Voss stepped forward slowly and laid a yellowed roll of parchment on the table.

“I believe,” he said, his voice hoarse but steady, “it is time to read the full will of the late Duke — Duchess Isabelle’s father.”

The will stated clearly: the domain of Aldenburg passed directly to Isabelle, with full authority, without any form of guardianship, from the day of her twenty-fifth birthday.

Which meant that for the past three years, Friedrich had never had any legal right to manage a single florin of the estate — and the annual gap of one hundred forty thousand florins was precisely what he had quietly siphoned off during those exact three years, after his authority had already ended, without ever telling me the truth.

No one voted to strip me of my inheritance that night.