The house has stopped breathing.
It's strange how a place can look the same, same marble floors, same soft light spilling from chandeliers, and yet feel hollow, as if its pulse has been stolen. The air still moves, but something in it listens.
Ever since Victoria's visit, the mansion has been too quiet.
Not peaceful. Watchful.
It began with the lights.
A faint flicker in the hallway chandelier while I tucked the twins into bed.
Then the hum of the security monitor downstairs that never used to make a sound.
Damian brushed it off as a power surge, but the walls disagreed. They seemed to pulse, as if aware.
When I passed the study, Alexander's laptop glowed faintly though it was closed. I hesitated, then the screen blinked alive.
White words, sharp and elegant, carved themselves onto the black glass:
You don't belong here.
They vanished before I could blink.
When I reopened the lid, only spreadsheets and e-mails stared back.
But my reflection looked… foreign.
Maybe I was haunted, not the house.
The next morning, a letter waited beneath the nursery door.
Unmarked. Folded with surgical precision.
He only builds to cage.
Five words, graceful and cruel.
I burned it in the sink. The flame turned blue before it died.
By the third night, unease had a face.
The television in the playroom switched on by itself. Static first, then a voice, female, faint, too calm.
He'll destroy you to save himself.
Zane looked up from his toy cars.
"Mommy, who's talking?"
I pressed the power button. Nothing.
The static hissed louder, like angry breath, then cut to silence, replaced by cheerful cartoons.
But in the black border of the screen, my reflection wasn't alone.
Someone stood behind me.
That night I unplugged every device in the house. Still, I felt watched.
When Alexander came home, I told him.
"It's nothing you need to worry about," he said, eyes on his phone.
"That's what you always say when it's everything to worry about."
He looked up then, those controlled, unreadable eyes of a man who could dismantle empires but couldn't admit fear.
"She's inside the system, isn't she?"
Silence.
That was my answer.
I moved the twins into my room. Their tiny breaths steadied me—until the baby monitor flickered on by itself.
Two small bodies asleep.
And behind them, the ghost of a woman in the doorway.
Across the bottom edge of the screen, words scrolled in soft white code:
They look like him.
The monitor slipped from my hands, shattering.
I wanted to scream but fear made me mute.
When I reached the study, Alexander's laptop was glowing again, filled with scrolling text like a confession written by a machine.
What did he promise you? That he'd change? He told me the same.
You think you have his heart. I only gave him his name.
I slammed it shut.
Perfume lingered, sweet, expensive, unmistakable. Victoria.
He didn't deny it when I confronted him.
"She left something in the system," he said, voice metal-cold. "A digital trap, malware that mimics emotion. Illusions, messages, projected audio."
"Then destroy it."
"I can't. Not yet. I'm tracing it, seeing what she still controls."
"So she lives here, inside your walls, while we play detective?"
"Selene…"
"No. Don't say my name like that fixes anything."
His expression tightened, the pain of a man realizing the ghost wasn't just in his code; it was in his past.
And I understood: he wasn't furious at her.
He was furious at himself, for once loving a mind capable of such brilliance turned cruelty.
Days blurred.
The kitchen alarm shrieked without cause.
My messages to Damian disappeared.
Sometimes, a woman's laugh echoed through the intercom.
You can't keep his children from me forever.
I'd whisper prayers, but the lights would flicker as if mocking them.
Then came the second letter, on my pillow:
Love makes fools of men. I make use of them.
No signature. No need.
I slept with lights on. Still, I woke certain someone had stood over me.
Alexander worked deeper into the night, colder each hour, eyes burning behind layers of code. He wasn't fighting malware anymore, he was wrestling memory.
And I was losing faith in the walls around us.
It happened on the seventh night.
The twins' monitor flickered again.
Blue light washed their faces, serene, sleeping.
Behind them, the silhouette of a woman.
Then text appeared, like breath across glass:
The twins are the only part of him I can still reach.
I dropped the monitor. Shards scattered like starlight.
When Alexander found me, I couldn't speak.
"She's not here," he said softly.
But even he didn't believe it.
The next morning, everything changed.
Damian arrived before dawn, his eyes wild with discovery. "I found it," he said. "Her backdoor."
He spread blueprints and digital schematics across the dining table, the sunlight still weak against them. Lines of code shimmered like veins.
"She embedded a mirror protocol inside your mainframe," he explained to Alexander. "Every command you send duplicates to her remote server. That's how she's been talking through your devices. But she left a signature, a recursion loop too elegant for automation."
Alexander leaned in, studying the pattern. To anyone else, it was gibberish; to him, it was handwriting.
"Victoria always built her systems like symphonies," he murmured. "Repeating phrases. Emotional architecture. Look, she even coded sentiment analysis into the trap. She wanted you to feel her presence, not just detect it."
Damian nodded. "She wanted to haunt you."
"And she did," I whispered.
Alexander's jaw hardened. "Not anymore."
For hours they worked, two minds dissecting madness.
Damian traced the virus through the mansion's network, while Alexander wrote counter-strings that reversed her logic. The room filled with the low hum of servers and the staccato of keystrokes, two men exorcising a digital ghost.
At one point Damian cursed softly. "She built a failsafe. If we cut her off too fast, it wipes your archives."
Alexander didn't blink. "Then we lure her in."
He typed something deliberate, an invitation, a challenge written in code.
Within minutes, the system reacted. Lights flickered, screens blinked, air vents hummed. The mansion fought back.
"She's trying to defend it," Damian said.
"Good," Alexander murmured. "That means she's still watching."
He pressed Enter.
Every light in the house flared white, then went black.
For ten long seconds, there was only silence.
Then, the systems rebooted, one by one.
The walls exhaled. The air stilled.
On the central monitor, a single line of text appeared:
Goodbye, Alexander.
And then, nothing.
Damian ran diagnostics.
"All channels secure. External access: terminated."
It was over.
Alexander leaned back, shoulders lowering for the first time in days. "She's gone."
I wanted to believe him.
That evening, he stood by the window, watching the city lights reappear like stars after storm.
"She underestimated you," I said.
He turned slightly, profile carved against the glass. "No. She overestimated love. She thought I'd leave the doors open for her ghost."
"Did you?"
A pause. Then, quietly: "For too long."
I joined him by the window. The reflection in the glass showed two figures side by side, haunted, exhausted, unbroken.
Damian had left hours ago, taking encrypted copies of everything to secure locations. The mansion was finally silent again, the kind of silence that meant peace, not threat.
Still, I couldn't shake the echo of that final message. Goodbye, Alexander.
It didn't sound defeated.
It sounded patient.
"Do you think she's finished?" I asked.
He met my gaze, eyes dark with certainty. "No. She never quits while she can still hurt."
He turned back to the glass, voice dropping lower. "Now that her digital reach is gone, she'll go where she still has power."
"Where?"
"The law."
That night, I tucked the twins in again. Their room felt lighter, the air easier to breathe.
But downstairs, I could sense Alexander already planning the next war, the one fought not with code, but with reputation, politics, and public ruin.
Victoria Hayes had lost her ghost's kingdom.
And somewhere, in her loneliness, I knew she was already rewriting the battlefield.
The mansion slept again, but peace felt temporary, like the hush before another storm.
As I drifted between wake and dream, a single thought anchored me:
When a woman like Victoria loses control of a system, she builds a new one out of people.
And by morning, she would prove it.