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“You watch too much television… well, watched,” she corrected.

I glared at her.

“Too soon?” She smirked.

“Hell yeah!”

She chuckled. “My apologies.”

“That didn’t sound sincere.”

“It wasn’t entirely.”

I laughed.

Miss Veda walked toward the windows overlooking the front of the property, taking her time as if what she was about to explain wasn’t something I had spent the better part of a year trying to understand.

“Caspian, the reason you cannot leave is actually quite simple. This house is where your life ended. Your death was sudden, violent, and left unresolved, so when your spirit separated from your physical body, it did not move on. It remained attached to the place where you died.”

I took in the room around us differently after that.

That was the same house I had spent millions building because I wanted everything exactly how I liked it. Only now the shit sounded less like a home and more like a supernatural ankle monitor.

“So because I died in here, I’m stuck in here?”

“For now, yes.”

“That’s some bullshit.”

“Death is rarely concerned with fairness.”

By then, Miss Veda had pulled a nail file from somewhere and started shaping one of her nails, completely unbothered by the fact that we were discussing why my dead ass couldn’t leave my own property.

“Clearly.”

She gave the edge of her thumbnail another pass before continuing. “By the time I became involved, your spirit had already established the house as its primary anchor. I could not undo that without interfering with forces I am not permitted to change. However, I was able to prevent your physical remains from creating an even more dangerous attachment to the exact moment your life ended.”

That pulled my attention away from the nail file.

“Hold up. What you mean when you became involved?”

She finally looked at me. “I removed your physical remains from the property.”

I stared at her. “Wait. You moved my body?”

“I made certain it was no longer here. Let’s put it that way.”

For an entire year, I had wondered what happened after everything went dark. I remembered pieces of that night, enough to know I died in my own damn house, but everything after that was blank. I didn’t know who touched my body, where it went, or why Mama, Lakelyn, the police, and everybody else searching for me had never found so much as a trace.

Now this woman was standing in front of me filing her nails while casually admitting she had the answer.

“Why?”

Miss Veda lowered the file. “Because your spirit was already attached to the house. Had your physical remains stayed here as well, there was a possibility that you would have become attached not simply to the property, but to the violence of your final moments. Some spirits become trapped that way. Their existence after death becomes centered around how they died, and instead of merely remembering those final moments, they repeatedly experience pieces of them.”

The humor left me.

“So you got me out of here physically before that could happen.”