#Chapter 155: The Portrait Drawer

Richard The portrait arrived late in the evening, wrapped in linen and thick archival paper. The outer edge was stamped with Liora’s personal crest and sealed in wax that had cracked faintly during transport. There was a handwritten note pinned to the string in her tight, elegant script, but I didn’t open it until I had locked the office door behind me and drawn the curtains. The lights were dim. I turned off the comms, and even the internal cameras were on looped delay. I didn’t want to be interrupted, not for this. Liora had retrieved it from the temple’s private archive, one of the last surviving originals painted before Serena’s death. It wasn’t new. It had simply been lost, hidden, intentionally omitted from the public record. Its absence had gone unnoticed for decades, because that’s what the temple had intended. It hadn’t been destroyed, just removed and forgotten by most, preserved by few. I peeled the wrapping slowly, aware of the weight of it. I felt the scrape of linen