SSS-Ranked Trash Hero: I Was Scammed Into Being Summoned-Chapter 76: The Letter on the Floor

The gate was still quiet when Lena finished making the tea. She set the pot on the kitchen shelf to stay warm and went to stand near the front of the estate, where she could see the road through the gap between the gate posts.

The afternoon light was already going flat, pulling long shadows across the dirt path that connected the village to the estate grounds.

She heard him before she saw him. The road had been silent all day, so even the slow rhythm of a horse walking without urgency carried clearly through the air.

Then the shape of a rider appeared through the fading light.

Lena opened the gate and stepped to the side as he rode through. He was younger than she kept expecting him to be, even though she already knew his age.

Nineteen looked different in person than it did attached to a title. He had a face that hadn’t quite settled into itself yet, sharp in some places, unresolved in others. His clothes were plain in the deliberate way, the kind of plain that took some effort to achieve.

He brought the horse to a stop and looked down at her.

"Lena," he said.

"Welcome back."

He dismounted, handed her the reins without ceremony, and walked toward the main door. Then he stopped halfway and turned back.

"Thank you," he said. "For keeping things running."

She nodded and took the horse to the stable.

She returned from the stable to find that

Caelum had gone inside without waiting, which she already understood was normal for him.

The surface memories told her he didn’t require escorting to his own rooms.

She went to the kitchen and checked on the tea. It was still warm. She poured a cup and brought it to the library, which was where the memories told her he usually went first after returning from anywhere.

He was already there. Seated by the window, jacket draped over the back of the chair, a book open in his lap before she had even set the cup down. He didn’t look up. She placed the tea within reach and left without saying anything, because the memories told her he didn’t require conversation when he was reading.

She spent the next hour doing the things a butler was supposed to do. She checked the kitchen stores and made a mental note of what was low. She walked the grounds once, slowly, looking at everything.

Two guards at the front gate, both old enough that their best years were clearly behind them. One horse in the stable. A ledger in the small office that told her, in careful numbers, exactly how little margin this household operated on.

She sat at the desk and looked at the ledger for a while.

The estate wasn’t just modest. It was the kind of modest that had been maintained carefully, which meant someone had been paying attention to the limits and working within them rather than pretending they didn’t exist. That was either Caelum or Lena. She suspected both.

She was still at the desk when the knock came from the front door.

She closed the ledger and went to answer it. One of the maids was standing at the entrance, holding a short report about the perimeter check. She took the paper, thanked her, and closed the door.

She turned back to the table.

That was when she saw it.

A folded envelope on the floor. Someone had slipped it through the gap at the bottom while she was speaking to the maid. She looked through the narrow window. Outside the estate was empty in both directions. Whoever had done it was already gone.

She picked the envelope up.

Her name was on the front. It was clearly addressed to her.

She suddenly remembered the food and walked to the kitchen, taking the letter with her. Once she saw that the food preparation was going well and everything was in order, She took a seat on a nearby chair, away from the servants, who for some reason were now blushing hard, the men and women alike. She opened it at the small table in the corner where the light came through the high window. The paper inside was a single sheet, folded once. The handwriting was small, the kind that belonged to someone who wrote things they didn’t want the wrong person to read.

There was no greeting. It started in the middle of a thought, the way messages do when both parties already know the context.

You have been in place long enough. The yearly royal conference approaches. Every prince will be expected to attend, including the twelfth. You know what is required of you before that date. Do not let comfort make you slow. Do not let proximity make you hesitate. The house of Vael did not send you to Ashfen to pour tea.

Finish what you were placed there to finish.

— The Hollow Seal

Lena read it once. Then again, more slowly. And then a third time.

She set the paper down on the table and looked at it.

The surface memories she had inherited from Lena Voss were supposed to cover her public identity, her role, her relationships, her knowledge of the household. They did. But they had edges, places where the information stopped without explanation, gaps she had written off as the dungeon’s natural limits on what transferred during possession.

She understood now that those gaps weren’t natural limits.

They were the parts Lena had kept buried.

The house of Vael had planted Lena Voss in this estate like a seed, and now the season had apparently arrived.

She folded the letter carefully and held it in both hands.

Caelum was in the library right now, reading a book with his tea going cold beside him.

And somewhere inside the memories she was borrowing, the woman whose face she was wearing had been counting down the days to kill him.

She stared at the folded paper for a long time.

Then she got up, went to the fireplace in the servants’ room, and burned it.

Erasing any traces of the fact that she, Lena Voss, was an assassin.