The instant my skin meets stone, something shifts — a vibration, faint but real,like the door recognizes me.Like it remembers my father.Like it knows I’m not supposed to be here and wants to open anyway.
The air hums.
My heart pounds so hard I feel it in my fingertips.
If this opens…If the truth is really behind it…If the Rivas’ darkest sins are carved into whatever Giovanni died protecting…
Then Santino — the man who kissed me like a confession he wasn’t ready to speak — is standing on the wrong side of history.
The lantern flame kicks violently again, throwing my shadow across the stone as if the tunnel is swallowing me whole.
Something behind the door moves.
Breathes.
Wakes.
And the ground under my feet feels suddenly, violently alive.
Everything is about to fucking change.
The Door That Knows Her Name
The key slot is small—barely big enough for a finger—yet it feels like it’s staring back at me. Judging me. Measuring every breath I take in front of Giovanni’s fucking vault.My lantern flameshivers against the carved lion crest, slicing jagged shadows over the stone. The air here is colder than in the tunnels before it, as if the door is bleeding ice from whatever Giovanni buried behind it.
I crouch, tracing the keyhole’s edge with my fingertip.
I don’t have the real key.Not the main one.Santino does.
And if I’m lucky, he doesn’t know that yet.
But I didn’t come down here unprepared.
My hand slips into my jacket, brushing the thin metal imprint I stole—copied—from the fold-out hidden in my father’s journal. His last secret. His last warning. The last piece of him I got to keep before Giovanni had him executed.
I pull it out.
The steel plate glints in the lantern light, carved with the impression of a key that shouldn’t exist. My father called it the ghost key.
A second key.One Giovanni didn’t trust to a Rivas.One meant for someone outside the family.
My breath tightens.
I press the imprint into the slot.
For a moment: nothing.Silence.Stillness.
Then—
click.
Not a full unlock.Not an open door.Just a shift.
A mechanism stirs inside the stone, ancient and grinding, like bones waking up.
The hair on the back of my neck lifts. The design of the lock did not keep enemies out. It was designed to keep specific people—the Rivas bloodline—from ever getting in.
The stone groans, dust drifting out in a thin ribbon.
