Her twin brother was dead. And she was going to have to go back to Wildewood Hall.
CHAPTER 1
ALEX
Alex’s hire car struggled up the hill, jolting back and forth as she failed to navigate potholes of truly epic proportions. The rain made visibility hopeless, the headlights barely showing her anything further than a few yards ahead. There were no streetlights out here. As a city girl, she felt like she was crawling along, feeling her way in the dark.
By the time she’d left the village of Kilfayne, which passed for the last bastion of civilisation around here, the rain came down like Niagara Falls and the night closed around her. She should have had plenty of time, planning to get to the house well before dark. But she’d got stuck behind a collision, and a tractor, and every other inconvenience possible. And it just got later and later.
Beyond the hedgerows, the trees made the road into a blind and twisting alley. There was nowhere to turn around. She was halfway up a mountain. Kilfayne was a good twenty minutes behind her now. And this was the only road – a generous word for the mud track she found herself on – to ‘The Big House’.
Wildewood Hall. Ancestral home of the de Wilde family. Her grandfather’s home, and a line stretching back before him allthe way back to God alone knew when. The estate he had left to Theo.
Hers now, God help her.
Once again, she wondered what on earth she was doing.
It was all her twin brother’s fault. That was the story of her entire life.
Coming back was a mistake. She knew that. Everyone knew that.
And yet here she was.
The place that had claimed the life of her brother. And before that her father. And ultimately, all her ancestors before them as well, she supposed.
It was so isolated and cut off, a law unto itself, Gran used to say. Almost fondly, or perhaps that was because she had been an old woman talking to children. Her grandmother, the little Alex could remember of the woman, had come from Kilfayne, and wasn’t as reserved as those born to the de Wilde name. When Alex’s grandfather had told her, in those haughty tones, not to spin wild tales, Gran had just laughed and spun a new one, even wilder. Tale after tale, of monsters and lost loves, of the children of the forest, of the walker in the woods, of the hungry grass and the endless appetites of lost gods…
Alex shivered at the memory. She blamed those tales, and the loss of her father, for imprinting such haunting dreams on her. Wildewood Hall was the last place on the whole bloody planet she wanted to go back to.
But it wasn’t like she had a lot of choice. Theo hadn’t left a will. He’d only been in his thirties after all and things like wills were not on his radar. The only things her twin brother had cared about were ecology, specificallytrees, and this wretched house, which was almost swallowed up by its associated forest, left to him by their grandfather a few years ago.
Probably as revenge. Or at least out of spite.
Theo hadn’t seen it that way of course. Theo was a constant beacon of optimism and hope, a shining light in the world. He could do no wrong. The golden child.
God, she had adored him. Even if he had driven her mad.
Alex hated this place almost as much as Theo loved it. She hadn’t been here in twenty years, and she still broke out in a cold sweat just thinking about it.
That the house was now hers would probably send their grandfather spinning in his miserable grave. So at least there was that.
How Gran would have laughed.
It was so dark and miserable that Alex almost missed the gates, which stood open on either side of the lane. It was the only indication that she’d reached her destination, and that this was the place where the so-called road ended and the drive began. They didn’t look like they had been closed in years.
She hadn’t come back here for their grandfather’s funeral. Theo had been buried with their mother just outside Dublin rather than in the de Wilde family vault here.
As she passed through their slated shadows, a shiver ran up her spine, even though she had the heat on full in the car. The windscreen wipers ground away, barely clearing the view ahead for more than a second.
She didn’t have to be here. She could let the lawyers handle it all. Sheoughtto let the lawyers handle it all. She just wanted to sell the wretched pile of ancient bricks and horrors. And that was what she would do once she had everything sorted out.
But she needed to know what happened to Theo. And to Dad, if she was honest. What really happened. She didn’t believe for one second that either death had been an accident.
Wildewood Hall was the only place she was going to find out any of that.
When she’d told the lawyers they hadn’t sounded happy. If she decided to take up residence, they told her, it could further complicate matters. Better to leave it all to them. They kept stalling over some detail or another. The sooner Wildewood was out of her life, the better.
Now it seemed the lawyers weren’t just driving up their bill.
