"I am no longer a Fletcher."
Those words. The same words Isaac had scribbled on that note all those years ago - they echoed inside his mind like a haunting refrain as he stepped into the grand dining hall of the Fletcher manor.
Everything looked almost exactly as he remembered. The chandelier still hung like a cluster of frozen stars above the long mahogany table, the walls were still lined with portraits of dead men wearing smug smiles, and that same faint scent of polished oak and cigars still clung to the air.
Only now, Isaac wasn't the frightened boy walking into a room of wolves.
He was a man who'd left their cage behind.
At the table sat the family he had abandoned.
His mother, delicate and reserved, looked like she had aged twenty years in the few years he'd been away. Her once-soft brown hair had streaks of grey woven through it, and though she wore pearls around her neck, her presence was as quiet and subdued as ever. She sat beside the man who had destroyed them all.
