He moved my father somewhere else when all the while I kept thinking he was in Italy. Why was he taking care of him? Moved him to another private hospital and spent so much money on his treatment?
It didn’t make sense. One minute he was ruining my life, hurting the people I loved, and the second he was… being this version of him I couldn’t recognise.
And the most terrifying thought of all crept in, uninvited, ruthless: if he had been watching for four years, if he had always been there… What else had he done that I hadn’t noticed yet?
Frustration rose like bile, and I quickly put the pictures back and tugged at my hair.
I needed to know more about him. Him, and not me. Where did he keep his past? Where did he keep the piece of himself? Obviously, it wouldn’t be so easy to know about him, but I wouldn’t stop even if death knocked at my door.
My eyes snapped to the bookshelf. The red room. He knew I wouldn’t return after what I discovered there. And what could be a better place.
I got up on my shaky legs and shook as I pulled out the volume from the shelf. The mechanism sighed, and wood slid, stone groaned. And there it was, the hidden room.
I stepped into a cathedral of perversion. Restraints glimmered like cold jewellery, and the ankle I wore burned against my skin. I was suddenly reminded of it. There were leather whips, cuffs, sticks, and some perverted-looking toys.
I swallowed. My heart bruised itself against my ribs. This is not who I was. And yet I couldn’t look away.
But I didn’t have time for this. I needed to find something, to make me feel less insane.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
His Past or Mine
I told myself I would only look for a moment, only to quiet the noise inside my head. But twenty minutes passed with nothing but frustration. Drawers yielded dust, telling me he didn’t use this room very much. I didn’t know if I should be relieved or not. But the ledgers and books I could not decipher. I tore through the artefacts of his secrets until exhaustion claimed me, until my body sagged against the bed with the bitter taste of defeat.
Maybe I was looking in the wrong place. Or maybe he didn’t leave any proof of his past anywhere in this mansion. Tired and defeated, I got up and looked around once again, finding nothing and was about to leave when my eyes landed on a half-hidden object, pushed behind the frame of an old mirror; a plain wooden box, unremarkable to the world. Yet before I touched it, my blood recoiled, as though my very bones knew what waitedwithin. My fingers trembled, the hinge groaned open, and my world collapsed.
Photographs. More photos.
Not recent. Old. Older than the weather. Weather-worn, fragile at the edges. A boy, solemn and sharp-featured, his eyes carrying shadows older than his years. And beside him, there was a girl. Brown haired, dark-eyed, and wearing a pastel blue dress, princess-style with a wide smile on her lips as she looked at the person clicking the photos. Mischief or tenderness painted on her face. But it was not her presence that struck me; it was his gaze.
The boy looked at her as if she were the only thing worth looking at.
He was taller than her by a few inches, wearing shorts and a matching shirt. I didn’t have to investigate to know who that boy was. I could recognise those stormy-grey eyes even if I lost my memories.
Every photograph, every angle, his eyes were fixated on her, drowning in her. Love unhidden, devotion raw, as though his young bones had already been carved for her alone.
My throat closed. Air became heavy. Was this her… his first wife? The first and true one? His childhood love and his chosen soul? The one he loved dearly?
I pressed my palm against my mouth to keep from sobbing aloud. It was ridiculous, was it not? I had no right to this ache, to this hollowing pain. I was nothing but an interloper in his story, and still, my heart fractured.
Why did I care? He loved another. He was someone else’s.
He was there. In those photos. Even younger, yes, but those storm-grey eyes had not changed. They were the same eyes that looked through me now, cutting, scorching, unravelling. Except here, in these frozen pieces of time, they weren’t stormy at all. They were soft. Open. Alive with something terrifying in its purity… love.
Not lust. Not possession. Not hunger disguised as desire.
Love.
The kind of love that swallows you whole and remakes you from the inside out. The kind of love I had never tasted from him, not once, not even in those rare, fleeting moments when he held me like I mattered.
Did he whisper her name when the world was silent? Did he dream of her when I lay beside him, foolish enough to believe the weight of his arm meant anything? Did he keep me close because I reminded him of her, or because I was convenient enough to ruin without consequence?
I pressed my palm against my mouth to keep the sound inside, but the sob clawed anyway, desperate, relentless. My ribs ached from holding it in. My eyes burned, but I couldn’t look away.
The way she leaned toward him. The way his gaze never wavered, as though she was gravity and he was helpless to resist her pull. The way time itself seemed to bow to them, as though the universe had chosen them long before I ever existed.
I was nothing but a trespasser. An intruder. A name written in the margins of a story that had already been told.
