Most of my father’s men were already down, their bodies scattered through halls that once echoed with authority. Silence replaced them. Heavy. Final.
I didn’t stop.
I rushed inside, my pulse hammering, my mind already slipping past strategy into something far more dangerous. Her name was the only thing left in my head.
“Loretta!”
My voice tore through the estate, raw and unrestrained.
I moved like a madman—kicking open doors, tearing through rooms, ripping aside anything that stood between me and the chance of finding her.
Drawers crashed to the floor. Furniture splintered under my hands. I checked every corner, every shadow, every locked door.
Nothing.
“Loretta!”
My voice broke this time, but I didn’t care. I kept going.
Down corridors. Up staircases. Back down again. Blood smeared under my boots, but I barely registered it. My men called out behind me, trying to keep up, trying to redirect me, but I wasn’t listening anymore.
I wasn’t thinking.
I was hunting.
Desperate. Unhinged. Refusing to leave without her.
And then... I found it.
A door that didn’t belong.
Hidden at the end of a narrow corridor, heavy and reinforced—wrong in a way everything else wasn’t.
This was it.
I didn’t wait. I pushed it open.
The smell hit me first—thick, suffocating. It clung to my throat, heavy and impossible to ignore. Still, I kept going, forcing myself down into the darkness beyond it.
That was where I found her.
The place no one spoke about.
The Pit.
It lay beneath the estate, far below the polished floors and quiet walls.
The air there was different—stale, damp, heavy with neglect. The kind of place that felt forgotten, like time itself had turned away.
And there she was.
Loretta.
Something inside me broke the moment I saw her.
She didn’t look like the girl I remembered.
Her hair was tangled and unkempt, falling around her face in uneven strands, as if even it had given up trying to hold itself together.
