The rain had stopped, but the house still sounded like it was remembering how to breathe. A damp, heavy silence had settled in the wake of the storm, a silence that was not empty but thick with residue. In the west wing, the shadows seemed to have congealed, the walls were damp to the phantom touch, and the silence was swollen, pregnant with unsound. The corridor stretched endlessly, a tunnel of gloom framed by portraits whose painted eyes refused to look away, their gazes fixed on a point just behind Areum's shoulder. The humming she'd heard before was stronger now—no longer a mere vibration in the floorboards, but a distinct rhythm, almost human, a lub-dub, lub-dub pulsing faintly through the chilled air like the secret heartbeat of the house itself.
Areum moved barefoot across the icy marble, her steps deliberate, her fear disguised as a razor-edged focus. The staff had withdrawn for the evening, and Lucien had vanished into the labyrinth of his office wing—his absence feeling like both a permission and a provocation. She was alone with the heartbeat.
She reached the locked door, the one Adele had warned her about. This time, the air around it was warmer, a febrile heat that radiated from the old oak. When she pressed her palm flat against the tarnished brass handle, it throbbed faintly, as though she were touching a living wrist.
Then came the whisper.
It wasn't language, not really—more like the sound of memory leaking through time, a sigh given form. But the tone—low, urgent, fragile—felt painfully familiar. A woman's voice. Fading.
"Don't open the light…"
The moment Areum blinked, it was gone, swallowed by the returning hum.
She pulled her hand back as if burned, her pulse skipping into a frantic gallop. The door, still immutably locked, seemed to breathe against her, in and out. In the distorted reflection of the brass lock, she caught her own expression—a face split cleanly between reason and a consuming obsession.
From somewhere deep in the mansion, faint and discordant, the piano in the distant salon began to play. No one had touched that instrument in years; she had checked. The melody was slow, fractured, mournful, the notes stumbling over each other like a forgotten prayer. And then she recognized it. It was a song she knew, a lullaby her sister had loved, the very one they had played at Soo-min's funeral.
The air left her lungs. This was no longer a haunting; it was a conversation.
By dawn, she had almost convinced herself it was all a trick of the mind—fatigue, echoes, the sophisticated tricks of a grief that had never fully healed. But the mansion, it seemed, refused to let her retreat into the comforting arms of logic.
During a breakfast taken in solitary silence, Adele entered, her footsteps unnaturally loud. She did not meet Areum's eyes as she set down a pot of tea, but then her hand hesitated, and a small, tarnished silver key was placed softly beside the fine bone china cup. "Found it in the laundry," the maid murmured, her eyes fixed on the floor. "Tucked in a forgotten pocket. It might belong to you."
The words were a carefully constructed lie. Areum didn't ask why a maid would risk giving the lady of the house something so clearly unsanctioned. The politics of the staff were their own silent war. She simply pocketed the key, the metal cold against her palm, and offered Adele a smile with the kind of polite opacity that could pass as gratitude—or a silent warning to never speak of it again.
The key did not fit the west wing door. It was for something smaller, more intimate. Later that afternoon, wandering with a feigned nonchalance through the mirrored gallery—a long, terrifying corridor lined with reflections of long-dead Vallents—she found a narrow, inlaid cabinet half-hidden behind a fall of dusty velvet drapery.
Her heart hammered against her ribs. The key slid in smoothly, the lock turning with a soft, definitive click.
Inside, resting on a bed of faded velvet, was a diary bound in pale gray leather. It was unmarked, save for a single word engraved into the spine: Inheritance.
The handwriting within was slanted and sharp, each letter a scar on the page.
"October 23rd. They say madness runs in blood, but no one warns you it also walks. It wears your face in the mirror and uses your voice in the dark. Last night, I saw her again in the west corridor. She called my name. I didn't answer. I think I'm starting to sound like her."
The entry ended there. The next page was torn out, leaving only a jagged edge.
Areum stared at the words until her vision blurred and the sharp, angular script seemed to move. The ink was old, a faded brown, but the emotion was fresh—a grief that hadn't learned how to die. Who wrote this? Isabelle? Lucien? Another soul entombed within these walls?
She looked up, her breath catching. Her reflection in the gallery mirror wavered, subtly out of sync. When she tilted her head, the Areum in the glass did not follow. Instead, it smiled—a small, cold, knowing curve of the lips that she had never worn.
And then, with a sound like winter ice breaking, a single crack split the glass, running directly through the reflection's heart.
Lucien found her that night in the winter garden, standing like a ghost among the withered roses. The glass ceiling above caught the fitful flashes of a returning storm, bathing the scene in pulses of silver ruin. He approached quietly, his coat damp with mist, his expression a mask of unreadable shadows.
"You shouldn't walk alone at this hour," he said, his voice raspy from disuse.
"I couldn't sleep," she replied, her eyes fixed on the blackened soil at her feet. "Do you ever sleep, Mr. Vallent?"
"Rarely. Sleep requires a peace this house has forgotten."
There was a silence, filled only by the distant rumble of thunder. Then she spoke again, her voice dangerously calm. "Your house has a heartbeat."
Lucien's gaze sharpened, piercing through the gloom, but he didn't deny it. "Most living things do."
"Even if what's living shouldn't be alive?" she pressed, finally turning to face him.
He studied her, the storm outside now perfectly mirrored in the tempest behind his eyes. "What did you find, Areum?"
"An echo," she said, holding his gaze. "And a warning."
Lucien stepped closer, until the space between them vanished and their reflections merged into a single, tangled form in the dark glass of the greenhouse. "The west wing remembers everything. It is the house's memory, and memory is a jealous thing. Some truths aren't buried—they're contained. Like a fire in a sealed room." His voice dropped to a whisper. "If you open what shouldn't be opened, it doesn't free the dead. It only trades places."
His words lingered like poison smoke between them.
Areum wanted to demand answers, to shake the truth from him, but the wind chose that moment to hurl itself against the greenhouse with renewed fury. A pane of glass above them shattered, sending a razor-sharp rain of crystal down upon the roses. Lucien's arm shot out, catching her instinctively, pulling her hard against his chest. The scent of rain and expensive cologne, the solid, unyielding heat of him—it was too human, too real, and therefore more dangerous than any ghost.
For a single, suspended moment, the house seemed to hold its breath, waiting.
When she returned to her room, her nerves still vibrating from the shock of the shattering glass and the shock of his touch, the diary was gone. The hidden cabinet stood open and empty. In its place, pressed beneath her pillow as if by a lover, lay a single, torn page. The paper was old, but the ink on it was fresh, glistening, and still wet to the touch.
"If you read this, then the door has already opened."
Outside, thunder rolled through the valley, a long, low drumroll of fate. The west wing whispered again—this time not as a warning, but as a welcome.
And somewhere deep beneath the foundations of the mansion, in a place of stone and soil and old, old bones, something that had been waiting finally answered.