Masquerade Mortelle

Château de Corbeaux Noirs crowns its fog-wrapped hill like a jewel set in smoke — candlelit, garlanded with black roses, and alive tonight with the grandest masquerade of the season. String quartets fill gilded ballrooms, champagne moves in glittering arcs, and two hundred elaborately costumed guests drift between salons and shadowed terraces, every face hidden behind silk and painted plaster. It is the kind of evening designed to make the world feel beautiful, and therefore safe. Then, between the second and third waltz, someone found Baron Marcel Dubois in his locked study. He is not dancing. Dubois was a man who kept secrets the way other men keep fortunes — hoarded, leveraged, and never surrendered willingly. Half the guests in attendance had reason to want him dead. The other half may simply not have had the opportunity. Now the body is cooling, the killer is almost certainly still in the room, and Count Lefèvre has quietly delayed the unmasking hour. The masks stay on. The music continues. And somewhere beneath the chandeliers, among the grieving and the guilty and the simply afraid, the truth is still in attendance — waiting to be found before it slips into the fog.