Raphael leaned over to examine the pages more carefully. "You're right. I should have noticed that immediately. It's too comprehensive. Too convenient."
"Fabricated," Silas said.
"Or heavily embellished from a kernel of truth," Elena offered, arriving just in time to hear the conclusion. She looked exhausted, clearly having spent much of the night working. "I found something that might explain this."
She spread her own research across the desk...notes, cross-references, a web of connections she'd spent hours constructing.
"There was a Fae noble family with a legitimate but distant claim to the vacant seat," Elena explained. "The Thornwood name does appear in historical records, but the actual bloodline died out nearly a century ago. No direct descendants."
"So someone's using a real but extinct family name," Damian said, "constructing false documentation to claim inheritance that doesn't actually exist."
