I don’t look at her. My eyes stay on the front doors, splintered and sagging — one hanging open like a jaw punched loose. “It is wrong,” I say. “It always was. We just dressed it in gold and called it a home.”
The air stinks of ash and rot and something sweet gone sour. Jasmine used to climb these walls. Zina loved it. My father hated it because it grew wild where he couldn’t command it. Now it’s strangled in black ivy and neglect, a green noose tightening around stone shoulders.
We step inside.
The foyer swallows us whole.
Once, there were lights here. Music. Laughter that never reached the eyes. Now silence sits thick and wet in my ears. Debris litters the marble floor like the bones of a party no one survived — shattered frames, half-strangled curtains, the great chandelier nothing but a skeleton of metal and glass sagging in defeat.
This is where men begged.Where deals were sealed with bloodless smiles.Where terror wore cologne.
Now it wears dust.
Pia stops at a fallen mirror. Her reflection fractures into a dozen versions of herself — pale, bruised, eyes too old for her face. She touches the glass like she’s checking whether one of those ghosts might reach back.
“He kept records here,” I murmur. “More than he dared hide anywhere else.”
Her gaze lifts to mine. “He trusted this place that much?”
I breathe out mildew and memory.“No. He trusted nothing. That’s what made him dangerous.”
We move deeper into the corpse of the house.
Every hallway leads somewhere that used to matter.The dining room where Zina fought him with her eyes and lost with her smile.The stairwell where Romeo once bled and laughed because pain hadn’t figured out how to frighten him yet.The gallery where our faces stare down from gilded frames like proof we’d been born into sin instead of love.
Pia falters at the top of the stairs. Her fingers curl into the sleeve of my jacket.
I stop without turning.“You don’t have to be here.”
She swallows. “Neither do you.”
I huff something that almost sounds like a laugh.“This house thinks I still belong to it. I’m just here to prove it wrong.”
We step over glass and into memory.
The floor groans beneath us. The walls whisper every secret ever screamed into them. And with each footstep, something coils tighter in my chest —
If there is proof Romeo’s hands are dirty…If there is proof they aren’t…
It will be here.
In the private rooms of a dead king who never stopped ruling.
Wind claws through a shattered window and drags a curtain with it — the sound like a sigh from something that died waiting to be claimed.
That’s when it hits.
Not fear.
Grief.
The kind that crawls into your lungs and dares you to breathe anyway.
This place was never a home.
It was a grave.
And I’ve just climbed in after my father to see what he left behind.
