The daughter’s room needed time.More points of contact.Door handle, switch, desk, drawers.The photograph went back to the desk after a careful clean—not because I cared, but because evidence mattered.I smoothed the carpet near her bed to erase boot impressions.Nightstand lamp.Book.
Master bedroom—cleaned top to bottom.Closets checked for fibers, none.
Hallway—banister, wall, each room’s outer handle, even the window I’d looked through.
Reached the stairs again, wiped the railing even though no trace remained.
Downstairs—every surface I interacted with received attention.Desk, safe, study doorknob, counters, drawer pulls.Never stepped in blood.Never touched a surface without thinking ahead.
When I approached the front door, a crooked picture frame caught my attention.Not staged—an accident from when I first entered.It showed the family on a beach.Their smiles were unguarded, genuine.
Leaving it crooked worked on paper, but disorder needed purpose.I straightened the frame until it aligned.Then wiped the glass and the wall in a methodical circle around it.
Last scan of the living room—every detail where I wanted it.
Bag of valuables secured.Everything inside would be destroyed, recycled through channels that erased origins.The cash would wash through my system.The rest would vanish.
I heard something upstairs and glanced up.Even though I’d watched them all breathe their last, I should check once more to be sure.I quietly went back up the stairs.The job would be done once I knew for certain I’d left no survivors.
Chapter Two
Mia
Snow started an hour before I hit the city limits, thick flakes spinning through the headlights until the highway felt like a tunnel.I’d driven this route so many times I could have done it half-asleep, every exit and curve familiar, yet the drive crawled under my skin tonight.Maybe exhaustion, the holiday pressure, or the unspoken warning buried in my father’s message—Come home.We need to talk about things.He never explained whatthingsmeant.I never asked.Questions in the Grant household carried consequences.
The exit for our neighborhood appeared, and as the tires compressed fresh snow, the sound was too sharp in the quiet.Most houses already shut their doors to the world—lights glowing through windows, families watching movies, last-minute wrapping, real laughter instead of the forced kind I grew up around.I should have arrived hours earlier, but the gallery needed extra work on the restoration before the December show, and I chose my boss’s disappointment over my father’s.In hindsight, maybe the wrong choice.Or maybe the only choice.
The familiar blocks rolled by under the streetlights—yards overloaded with decorations, wind whipping inflatable Santas side to side, reindeer made of wire frames coated in frost.My old high school sat dark, parking lot untouched, the coffee shop where I hid between classes closed for the night.The whole town looked smaller than I remembered, like time had shrunk it behind my back.
Turning onto our street sent the same conflict radiating through my chest that always came with coming home.My family loved, but never without conditions.Approval had a price.Every gift had strings.Dad’s business funded everything—college tuition, vacations, the roof over our heads—but the source of that money stayed unspoken.Men in tailored suits filtered through the house at strange hours, holding hushed conversations with doors closed.Silence was the rule.Survival depended on it.
Our house waited at the end of the cul-de-sac, an elegant display of control masquerading as holiday cheer.White and gold lights lined the roof in perfect symmetry, the wreath on the door massive and expensive, bushes trimmed into flawless shapes under a new layer of snow.It resembled a catalog photo—less celebration, more presentation.
I parked behind my brother’s old Honda.Dad’s Mercedes sat where it always did.Every vehicle accounted for.In theory, everyone should have been inside and safe.Yet my pulse spiked the second I cut the engine, because logic had nothing to do with the dread creeping over me.Something felt wrong in a way I couldn’t explain.
I stayed in the car longer than necessary, heat blasting while my headlights pinned the front door in bright white.No silhouette crossed the windows.No sounds reached me—not music, not voices, not footsteps.Every holiday growing up was noise.Forced laughter.Forced joy.Forced togetherness.Silence had never belonged here.And then I saw why the silence disturbed me: the door stood cracked open by an inch or two.
My father never left the house unsealed.He checked locks twice every night.He double-armed the security system if he so much as retrieved mail late.A front door left ajar didn’t match anything about the man who lived here.
Explanations formed fast—someone stepped outside and came right back in, someone forgot the latch, someone overloaded with grocery bags didn’t tug the door shut all the way.Each possibility dropped as soon as I thought of it.None aligned with how this house worked.
I shut off the engine and the silence outside the car pressed into me like weight.Snow glittered under the porch light while I walked toward the front steps, each footprint sinking into soft powder.Warm lighting from the yard cast a glow over everything that should have comforted me, but my body registered danger, not welcome.
I stopped at the bottom stair.“Dad?”The word came out thin, like the air stole most of it before it reached the door.No response.“Mom?Tommy?”Still nothing.
My cousin had mentioned possibly staying the night.I didn’t see her car, but it was possible she’d gotten a ride.For a house with three or four people inside, it was eerily quiet.Why hadn’t anyone come out when they’d heard me arrive?Mom almost always greeted me at the door.
The boards creaked when I climbed the steps, a sound I shouldn’t have heard through the snow.My breath sounded too loud in the quiet, and the gap in the door widened as I reached it, a slice of darkness where a lock should have held firm.“If this is another test,” I muttered, anger an instinctive shield against rising panic, “not funny.”Dad used to stage bizarre scenarios to “teach me preparedness,” pushing me to react under pressure.But this didn’t feel like any twisted lesson.
I pushed the door open with two fingers.
The foyer glowed brightly, every light turned on.The Christmas tree filled the living room, decorated exactly how Mom preferred—white ribbon spiraling perfectly, glass ornaments spaced at calculated intervals, wrapped gifts arranged by size and color.A warm pine-and-cinnamon scent filled the air.Underneath, faint but undeniable, a metallic tang rode the heat vents and curled into my throat.
“Dad?”I stepped inside and set my bag by the hall table.My keys hit the wood, and the sharp clink echoed far too loudly in the stillness.The living room looked untouched.The kitchen gleamed in the distance.The stairs waited on my right.Nothing seemed wrong—yet nothing felt right.It didn’t feel empty.It felt staged.
Something near the stairs broke the illusion.Where the tree lights reflected red, then green, then gold on the shining floor, a darker shape absorbed every color instead of reflecting it.A thick pool, glossy and still, spread wider across the hardwood.
Oil didn’t spread like that.Oil didn’t smell like iron.
