Mia M Dre's Arc

Chapter 4 of 13

The cart moved slow enough that Mia could follow without running, but fast enough that her legs—still foreign, still wrong—had started to burn. The merchant kept to the wider streets where the cobblestones were smooth and the morning crowd was thin. He turned onto a road that led out of the market district, and Mia spotted the old stone bridge ahead—moss thick on its worn steps, the arch so ancient it looked like it had grown from the earth itself. Her grandmother had described this bridge in one of her letters, the ones Mia had found bundled in cloth at the bottom of the family chest. The same letters that mentioned a merchant family with an anchor on their crest. Mia's eyes went to the back of the cart, where a wax seal caught the morning light. An anchor, detailed and elegant, mounted on the wood like a family mark. Her breath stopped. This wasn't just any merchant. This was the same family her grandmother had written about—the ones who'd bought her jeweled shell necklace decades ago, promising to keep it safe in their collection. Mia's fingers went cold. The merchant hadn't just stolen the comb. His family had been collecting her grandmother's pieces for years, one transaction at a time, building a set. The necklace her grandmother sold. The comb he'd taken. How many more were already in his vault, cataloged and locked away? She thought of her mother's face when she talked about the old pieces, how she'd wave her hand and say they were probably scattered across the surface by now, lost to time. But they weren't lost. They were being gathered. The cart slowed as it reached the bridge, and Mia made herself keep walking, her mind racing through what this meant. She'd come to recover one piece. But if the merchant's family had been targeting her grandmother's collection all along, then getting the comb back wouldn't stop them. They'd already proven they knew which pieces mattered, which ones carried her family's history. She couldn't just take the comb and disappear. She needed to know what else they had—and whether her grandmother had known what she was really selling to them all those years ago.