The Devil's Dinner
The first dinner as husband and wife began in a silence so profound it felt like a third presence at the table. The great hall of the Vallent estate was a cavern of shadows and shifting light, and the table was its centerpiece—a vast expanse of polished ebony that stretched endlessly between them, a mocking representation of the chasm in their new union. It was dressed in a shroud of white linen, stark and unforgiving, upon which the candlelight did not warm but wounded. Each flame was a needle-point of illumination, sharp enough to pierce the air, casting long, dancing daggers of shadow that flickered across their faces.
Areum sat with a stillness that was less serenity and more suspension, her posture carved from the same cold porcelain as the untouched service plate before her. Her hands were folded in her lap, a deliberate anchor. Across the impossible distance, Lucien's gaze was not on her, but on the deep, blood-rich wine in his crystal glass. He studied its surface as if it were a scrying pool, its dark reflection holding truths that any spoken word between them would only corrupt.
Every servant in the room moved like ghosts in a well-rehearsed haunting. They were soundless, their footfalls absorbed by the thick Persian rugs, their forms gliding in and out of the penumbra. They presented each course with a synchronicity that felt inhuman, their faces smooth masks of non-expression. The Vallent estate did not tolerate noise; it demanded a liturgy of quiet. Even the ancient grandfather clock in the corner, a monstrous edifice of oak and brass, seemed to tick under duress, its heavy *tock… tock…* not marking time, but measuring the void between the syllables of their names: *Lu-cien… A-reum…*
"Eat," Lucien said at last. The word dropped into the silence like a stone in a still pond. His voice was low, steady—a baritone woven from velvet and authority. Yet, if one listened closely, something in its foundation trembled, almost imperceptibly, the subtle vibration of a strained wire. "You haven't since morning."
Areum's eyes lifted from her plate to his face, but he was still looking at his wine. Slowly, she lifted her fork. It was not an act of obedience, but a strategic one—a move to break the suffocating spell of the moment. The silver tines gleamed, a small defiance. Her mind, however, raced behind the marble stillness of her features. *He notices. He counts the meals I skip. He watches not as a husband concerned for his wife's well-being, but as a warden assessing his charge. That means he doubts me—or perhaps, and this was a more dangerous thought, he doubts himself.*
The food was a masterpiece of culinary art, each component placed with geometric precision. But as she took a bite of the seared scallop, it tasted of nothing but expense and emptiness. The delicate saffron sauce was ash on her tongue. Each mouthful was a negotiation between the politeness demanded by her new station and the visceral sense that she was consuming something venomous, that the opulence itself was the poison.
Halfway through the main course—a medallion of venison so rare it nearly bled onto the plate—Lucien's gaze finally rose and met hers across the vast battlefield of the table. The directness of it was a shock.
"You're not afraid of me," he said. It was not a question, not a boast. It was a clinical observation, the statement of a scientist noting a curious anomaly.
Areum did not look away. She let the silence stretch for a beat, two, before replying with an evenness she did not feel. "I married you. Fear isn't part of the contract."
A ghost of amusement, faint and cold, curved Lucien's lips. It did not reach his eyes, which remained the color of a winter storm. "No, but curiosity is. You look at me like I'm a puzzle you're determined to solve. A lock you must pick."
"And you?" she countered, her voice softening to a blade's edge. "You look at me like I'm a weapon you've already disarmed. A bullet you've safely caught in your palm."
The candlelight between them flickered violently, as if a door had opened somewhere in the depths of the house. In that sudden dance of light and shadow, she saw it—a hint of a storm beneath his calm surface, a flash of something raw and unguarded. He leaned back, the leather of his chair sighing softly.
"Maybe both are true," he conceded, the words a quiet admission that seemed to cost him something.
That night, as she lay in the lavish isolation of her bedroom—a room adjacent to his, connected by a sitting room neither used—the silence returned, heavier and more profound than before. It was a weighted blanket, a smothering presence. But beneath its dense fabric, a new pulse had begun to beat. A rhythm of two predators, two prisoners, circling each other in the dark, their every step a move in a war disguised as a marriage.
### **Segmen 2: The Room with No Windows**
The west wing of the Vallent mansion was not declared forbidden through words; words were too direct, too honest for this house. Instead, its prohibition was communicated through a language of absence and aversion. It was a geography of silence within the greater silence of the estate. The air in the connecting corridor was colder, stale with disuse. The doors here were not merely locked; their keyholes were empty, dark eyes staring blankly, and some doors had no hardware at all, their smooth surfaces a clear statement: *You are not wanted here.* The staff, so efficient elsewhere, would perform a subtle, choreographed detour, their eyes sliding away from the west wing's entrance as if the very sight of it carried a moral contagion.
On the fourth night, a sound found her. Lying in the dark, Areum heard it beneath the groaning of the ancient pipes and the sigh of the wind—a faint, rhythmic hum. It was too low and consistent to be the wind, too deliberate to be machinery. It was a vibration that seemed to travel up through the bones of the house and into her own.
Driven by an impulse she could neither name nor suppress, she rose, wrapping a silk robe around her shoulders. The corridor was a tunnel of shadows, lit only by the occasional moonlight slicing through a high window. The hum grew clearer, a resonant *thrum* that led her like a siren's song to a heavy oak door, darker and more imposing than the others. It was covered in a shroud of dust that glittered in the weak light, and it was sealed by a single, tarnished brass lock, large and ornate, like something from a medieval keep.
Her hand hesitated only once, hovering in the cold air. Then, she produced the keycard Lucien had given her upon her arrival, a sleek, modern thing of black plastic. "For access to your personal quarters and the main galleries," he'd said, his tone leaving no room for discussion. She pressed it against the smooth wood near the lock, a futile, desperate gesture. Nothing. It didn't fit. It was a key to a gilded cage, not to its secrets. Bending closer, she saw her own face reflected in the tarnished brass of the lock—distorted, stretched, her features merging into a grotesque mask. Part wife, part spy. The two roles were now irrevocably at war.
"Mrs. Vallent."
The voice was so quiet it seemed to form from the darkness itself. Areum turned sharply, her heart hammering against her ribs. Adele, the head maid, stood a few steps away, her hands clasped neatly in front of her starched apron. Her tone was the epitome of calm servitude, but her eyes, wide and dark, were trembling.
"That part of the house is not maintained," Adele said, the words practiced. "The floorboards are unsafe. It is best not to wander there."
Areum willed her own pulse to slow. "Then what do I hear?" she asked, her voice barely a whisper. "There is a… a humming."
Adele's gaze flickered towards the door for an instant before returning, filled with a genuine, superstitious fear. "Perhaps the house breathes," she murmured, her voice dropping to a confessional hush. "Old mansions have lungs. They sigh at night. It is not for us to listen too closely."
It was a poetic lie, a beautiful, fragile shield over something ugly. And both women, standing in the dark corridor, knew it. Areum offered a tight, polite smile. "Thank you, Adele. I'll return to my room."
She walked away, feeling the maid's anxious gaze on her back until she turned the corner. But as she lay back in bed, it was not Adele's warning she heard. It was the hum, now internalized, its rhythm syncing with the frantic beat of her own heart.
That night, she dreamt. Not of shadows or monsters, but of a girl's laughter—bright, clear, and utterly alive—echoing down the forbidden corridor, a sound of pure joy that was profoundly, heartbreakingly out of place. And when she woke, gasping in the grey pre-dawn light, the dream was so vivid that she pressed her face into her pillow. It smelled faintly, unmistakably, of woodsmoke.
### **Segmen 3: The Portrait and the Scar**
Two mornings later, the memory of the smoke still clinging to her senses, Areum found herself in the library. It was a room of towering, mahogany bookshelves that held more dust than stories, the leather-bound volumes exuding an aroma of forgotten knowledge and slow decay. Her fingers trailed absently along the spines until she stopped before a painting she had not noticed before.
It was a portrait of a young woman, perhaps in her early twenties. She had hair the color of winter wheat and a smile that was both mischievous and gentle. But it was the eyes that arrested Areum—the unmistakable Vallent eyes. Silver-gray, sharp as shards of glass, yet in this portrait, they were alight with warmth and intelligence. A small, brass plaque on the frame was elegantly engraved: *Isabelle Vallent (1997–2019).*
The name, the dates, struck her with the force of a physical blow. 2019. The year her own world had fractured. The year her sister, Soo-min, had died. A coincidence? In a place like this, there were no coincidences, only designs. The tightening in her chest was a familiar ache, now sharpened by a needle of suspicion.
"Beautiful, isn't she?" Lucien's voice came from directly behind her, making her start. She had not heard him enter. His tone was carefully detached, the way one might speak of a piece of art in a museum. But when she turned slowly to face him, his eyes, fixed on the portrait, betrayed a tremor of memory, a deep and personal grief he could not fully school.
"Your cousin," Areum stated, remembering his words from the dinner.
"The last to truly smile in this house," he confirmed, his gaze still locked on Isabelle's painted one.
Areum studied his profile, the hard line of his jaw. "What happened to her?"
"A car accident," he replied, the official story rolling off his tongue with practiced ease. Then, he paused. The silence stretched, thick and heavy. He looked away from the portrait and directly at Areum, and in that look, a barrier came down. "Or so they said."
The sentence cracked the carefully maintained air between them. It was a forbidden truth, a crack in the foundation of the Vallent narrative. He wasn't supposed to say it. She wasn't supposed to hear it. Yet there it was, hanging between them—truth brushing against truth, like flint against steel, promising a spark.
Her voice, when she found it, was softer, laced with a empathy she had not intended to show him. "You don't believe it?"
Lucien's hand came up, a seemingly absent gesture, and brushed the edge of his jaw. The movement shifted his collar, revealing for a fleeting second a faint, silvery scar that started just below his ear and vanished into the shadow of his shirt. A mark of violence, carefully hidden.
"Belief is a luxury, Mrs. Vallent," he said, the formality of the name a sudden, stark distance between them. "One I lost the night Isabelle died."
In that moment, Areum felt the ground tilt slightly beneath her feet. The library, with its smell of dust and memory, seemed to rearrange itself around this new understanding. The cold, controlling man she had married was also a man in mourning. The guilt she had sensed in him might not be the guilt of a perpetrator, but of a survivor—someone who had failed to prevent a tragedy, someone else trapped in the gilded cage of this house and its secrets.
He stepped closer then, so close she could see the faint pulse beating at the base of his throat, could smell the faint scent of sandalwood and old books on his clothes. His proximity was not threatening, but intensely intimate.
"If you ever want to know what happened in this house," he said, his voice so quiet it was almost a breath against her cheek, "stop asking questions. The walls have ears, and they report only to the past. Start listening. The house… it tells its own stories, if you're quiet enough to hear them."
He held her gaze for a moment longer, a silent communication passing between them, then turned and left. When he was gone, the air in the library felt thinner, rarefied, as though a vital element had been removed. Or as though something in the house, something old and watchful, had just opened its eyes.
### **Segmen 4: The Breaking Silence**
The next dawn did not break so much as it seeped into the world, a slow bleed of grey light through a veil of relentless rain. It whispered against the windowpanes of the mansion, a constant, sibilant warning, the sound of a million tiny voices.
Areum sat by the window in her room, a blanket drawn around her shoulders, watching the droplets race each other in frantic paths down the glass. Her own reflection was ghosted between them, a pale, fragmented face superimposed on the weeping landscape. Somewhere, deep within the skeleton of the house, beyond the west corridor, the humming had returned. It was no longer a faint thrum but a persistent, low-frequency vibration, louder and more insistent now, like the heartbeat of some great, buried beast stirring behind the walls.
Below, in the grand hall, a shadow moved. Lucien, dressed in dark colors, passed through the pools of dim light, his stride purposeful. He paused, as if sensing her observation, and his head tilted upwards towards her window.
For the first time, Areum did not look away. She did not retreat from the casement or pretend to be occupied. She met the shadow of his gaze across the rain-streaked distance, her own expression not of defiance, but of acknowledgment. The silent treaty of mutual ignorance was void.
The game had changed. The silence between their names, that vast, measured space the grandfather clock had so meticulously guarded, was finally, irrevocably, breaking.