Chapter 3: The Portrait in the Attic
Morning sunlight filtered through the dust-caked skylights of the third-floor attic, illuminating rows of shrouded furniture and forgotten portraits. Custa had slipped away while the morning nurse was downstairs arguing with the cook over dietary restrictions. At three years old, his legs were short, but his curiosity was an untamed flame. He wandered past stacks of leather-bound ledgers until he found a canvas leaning against a brick chimney, its face turned toward the wall.
With a toddler's stubborn persistence, Custa grabbed the heavy wooden frame and dragged it around. The canvas revealed a young woman with startling blue eyes and messy blond hair, identical to his own reflection. She was wearing a simple white cotton dress, holding a small silver locket in her palm, smiling with a warmth that seemed entirely foreign to the Vance estate. Painted in the bottom corner was a signature: Clara Vance, 2018.
"You shouldn't be up here, boy."
Custa gasped, dropping the corner of the frame. Viktor stood at the top of the wooden attic stairs, his black shirt sleeves rolled up to reveal thick forearms corded with muscle. For a brief second, the sternness in Viktor's eyes softened, replaced by a shadow of profound sorrow that he extinguished almost instantly with a grim tightening of his jaw.
"She liked to paint," Viktor said quietly, walking across the creaking floorboards to stand beside the toddler. He reached down and touched the painted face of the young woman with a scarred finger. "She thought art could soften iron mines and bank accounts. She was wrong."
"Mama?" Custa whispered, his voice small and hesitant, testing a word he rarely heard allowed in the halls below.
"Your mother," Viktor corrected gently, though there was no warmth in his tone. "She left this house because she could not bear the weight of what we are. And now you are here, bearing her eyes and your father's stubborn spirit. Pick up that frame. We are taking it down to the basement furnace."
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Custa stared up at the towering man, the instinct for survival kicking in beneath his messy blond hair. Instead of obeying, the boy wrapped his tiny arms around the bottom of the heavy wooden frame, planting his feet firmly on the dusty floorboards. He shook his head, a gesture of absolute refusal that caught Viktor completely off guard.
Viktor stared down at the toddler, seeing not a disobedient child, but the ghost of Clara looking back at him through those bright blue eyes. A muscle twitched in Viktor's jaw. The silence in the attic stretched taut, broken only by the distant ticking of a grandfather clock downstairs, measuring out a tense standoff between generations of iron and blood.
