The torn page was a cold brand against her skin. It smelled faintly of iron and roses—the distinct, cloying scent of memory preserved in fear, like flowers pressed in a book of battles. Areum stared at the words until they ceased to be mere ink and began to feel like a living pulse thrumming against her retina, a second heartbeat imposed upon her own: "If you read this, then the door has already opened."
But the door, the physical, imposing slab of oak at the end of the west corridor, remained locked. Or so it pretended. The house was a master of such illusions, presenting solidity where there was only a fragile veil, and silence where a scream was gathering.
She folded the note into her palm, the paper crisp and unnaturally cold, and moved through the hallway barefoot. The polished marble was a frozen river beneath her soles, its chill seeping up through her bones, a path of ice leading to a single, terrible destination. The house, in its profound and watchful stillness, seemed to lean in, to listen, to hold its breath in a collective, ancient anticipation. The portraits of Vallent ancestors, their faces bleached by time and their eyes sharp with inherited cunning, followed her progress. Their expressions were a gallery of grim judgment, caught between a frozen, useless pity and a silent, centuries-old accusation, as if she were the one trespassing on their grief, not the other way around.
She reached the west corridor again. This time, the pervasive, mechanical hum that had first called to her was gone—vanished completely. It had been replaced by something infinitely worse: a vacuum of sound, a silence that not only noticed her but expected her, that had been waiting, with infinite patience, for her specific footfall on this specific night.
The silver key Adele had given her—a act of rebellion or a carefully laid trap—trembled faintly between her fingers. It was not her hand that shook, she was sure of it; it was the key itself, vibrating with a soundless anticipation, as if it were a living thing returning to its home. She slid it into the tarnished brass lock, her body braced for the final denial, the shriek of metal that would tell her she had reached her limit.
Instead, the mechanism gave way with an almost tender, yielding sigh. The sound was soft, intimate, and more terrifying than any roar of defiance.
The door opened not into a room, but into a memory, perfectly preserved under glass.
A faint, ghostly smell washed over her—lavender and burnt paper. It was a funeral bouquet for a lost life, the sweet fragrance of nostalgia clashing violently with the acrid stink of destruction. Dust motes, stirred by the door's movement, danced like forgotten spirits in the narrow beam of grey light that spilled from a single, grime-caked window, as if the sun itself dared not look too closely upon this place. There was a bed, untouched by time or decay, its lace coverlet pristine and white as a shroud, and on the wall above it—a mirror, its surface hidden beneath a funereal black cloth, a blind eye in a seeing face.
The air itself was thick, heavy, and it carried the unbearable weight of a name she hadn't dared to speak aloud in years, a name she had locked away in the most secret, sacred chamber of her heart, lest it poison everything else.
"Eun-ji," she whispered, the sound a fragile, breaking thing in the suffocating quiet.
Her sister's name dissolved into the stillness like smoke, and for a moment, there was nothing. No sound, no movement. Just the dreadful weight of acknowledgement. Then, faintly, as if emerging from the depths of a deep well, the piano began again. This time, the melody was not a distant, echoing phantom from the main-floor salon. It came from inside the room, the notes seeming to form in the very air around the draped mirror, materializing from the dust and the despair.
The sound, clear and impossibly present, was a thread pulling her forward. It led her away from the shrouded mirror, down to her knees on the cold floorboards before the bed. Her fingers brushed against the carved wood of the frame until they found it—a small, ornate drawer, so seamlessly integrated it was meant to be felt rather than seen, a secret kept by the furniture itself.
Inside, the past was waiting, neatly stacked and bound with a faded ribbon the color of dried blood. They were letters, dozens of them, all unmarked, their envelopes blank and anonymous, like sealed accusations. But tucked among them, placed with deliberate care, was a small, square photograph.
Her breath hitched. It was a picture of Isabelle Vallent, her silver-gray eyes alight with a vivacity that seemed to mock the house's gloom. She was standing in the winter garden, the very place where Areum and Lucien would later have their tense confrontation. Isabelle was laughing, her head thrown back in a moment of unguarded joy, her arm linked familiarly, possessively, with another girl. The other girl had dark, flowing hair that defied the subdued light, sharp, intelligent eyes that held a knowing glint, and a familiar, mischievous tilt to her smile that struck Areum with the force of a physical blow, knocking the air from her lungs.
It was her sister. Eun-ji.
The date, scrawled in white ink on the border, was a precise, brutal coordinate in time: two months before the official date of Isabelle's "accident," and exactly two months before Eun-ji's own unexplained disappearance—a disappearance the authorities, with suspicious haste, had ruled a suicide, a conclusion that had never sat right with Areum's gut, only with the convenient facts.
Her mind spiraled through a frantic, desperate web of possibilities: a staggering, meaningless coincidence; a cruel trick of light and resemblance; an elaborate, monstrous deceit orchestrated by Lucien to break her. But then her eyes, sharpened by years of grief and weeks of suspicion, caught it—at the bottom of the photo, almost invisible against the dark earth of the garden path, was a line of faint handwriting in silver ink:
To L.V. — she reminds me of her. Don't let them see.
Her blood turned to ice water in her veins, a cold flood of dread. The initials could mean only one thing. Lucien Vallent. The photograph was a message to him. She reminds me of her. Who was the first 'her'? And who were 'they'? The questions swarmed, stinging and relentless.
The ghostly piano in the room stopped abruptly, the final note hanging severed in the air, a musical gasp. And from the mirror beneath the black cloth came a faint, palpable vibration, a shifting of energy in the room, as though someone—or something—on the other side of the glass had softly, slowly, exhaled.
Areum stood, drawn toward the draped mirror as if by a lodestone. Her own reflection in the dust-covered fragments of visible glass was fractured, a puzzle of a woman coming undone. "What did you do to her?" she whispered, the question meant for Lucien, for the house, for the silence itself, for the thing behind the cloth.
In the mirror, one of the fragmented reflections—a sliver of a mouth, a curve of a cheek—smiled. A cold, knowing, and utterly foreign expression.
But she, Areum, had not.
That evening, a summons came not in words, but in the unspoken language of the house. The setting was shifted from the cavernous main hall to the intimate morning room, a space that felt more like a trap. The table was smaller, the distance between them negligible, the air tighter, charged with the unspoken truths now laid bare between them. Candles burned low in their silver holders, their flames restless and flickering, mirroring the unquiet storm gathering behind Lucien's carefully composed gaze.
"You've been walking the west wing," he said, his voice flat, without looking up from his plate of food, which he had not touched. It was not a question, but a statement of fact, heavy with the gravity of a broken taboo.
"And you've been watching me," she replied, her voice steady, a testament to her will, though her hands lay like blocks of ice in her lap.
His fork froze midair, the sterling silver glinting like a weapon in the candlelight. "I watch everything that tries to destroy my house."
Areum set her wine glass down with a precise, deliberate click that echoed like a gunshot in the tense space. "Then you already know I found the room. You already know I found the photograph."
Lucien leaned back in his chair, the fine leather sighing beneath his weight. The faintest trace of exhaustion—or perhaps it was a deep, soul-weary resignation—crept into the lines of his face, aging him years in the dim light. "What did you expect to find, Mrs. Vallent? Salvation? Absolution?"
"Answers," she said sharply, the word a honed blade laid on the table between them. "Your cousin knew my sister. Why? How?"
He met her eyes then, and the temperature of the room seemed to drop several degrees, the fire in the grate notwithstanding. "Because your sister wasn't who you think she was." The statement hung between them, terrible and precise, a wrecking ball aimed at the foundation of her grief, of her very identity.
"She worked for us," he continued, his voice dropping to a dangerously quiet register, forcing her to lean in, to become a conspirator in her own devastation. "For my father. She was a researcher, brilliant and discreet, hired for her unique knowledge of archival preservation. Isabelle took her under her care—saw a kindred spirit, another brilliant mind trapped in a gilded cage. They became… close. A friendship that was a light in this place. Until the night everything burned."
Areum's throat tightened, her composure cracking like the glass in the mirrored gallery. "You're lying. She would have told me. She told me everything."
Lucien's gaze softened—not with pity, but with a grim, horrifying recognition of her shattered world. "If I were lying, you wouldn't still be sitting here. You would have already fled this mausoleum. You stay because you feel the truth in it. Because you've always known the official story was a poorly fitted lid on a screaming box."
For a long time, they sat in a silence that was its own form of violence, a duel without movement. Then he reached across the table, his movements slow, deliberate. His fingertips, warm and unsettlingly alive, brushed against the torn page she had folded and placed beside her plate, a silent admission of all she now knew. "You shouldn't have opened the west wing," he murmured, his voice almost lost beneath the low, hungry crackle of the fire. "The house remembers differently from you. It doesn't care for our versions of the truth, our neat little narratives. It only knows what it has consumed."
As if on his command, the candles flickered violently, as if struck by an unseen wind, and in the brief, consuming darkness that followed—a darkness that felt like a blink of the house itself—she saw it. In the dark, reflective surface of his wine glass, a pale oval formed. It was her sister's face, Eun-ji, her features serene but her eyes burning with an intense light, her lips curved into a faint, knowing smile, staring out from where no reflection should be.
That night, sleep was not a sanctuary but a descent. Areum dreamt of corridors that twisted not into other places, but into mirrors, each reflecting a different fragment of her splintering self. She dreamt of whispers that were not heard but felt, stitched into the very wallpaper like vile, living embroidery that squirmed when she passed.
When she woke, gasping, her skin slick with a cold sweat, the pre-dawn light was a grey smear on the windowpane, leaching the color from the world. Lucien was standing there, his back to her, a stark, unmoving silhouette staring into the weeping rain, as if he could see answers in its endless fall.
"Who are you trying to save?" she asked softly, the words torn and raw in the quiet room, a question that encompassed him, her, Isabelle, Eun-ji, all the ghosts that crowded the hallway.
His reflection in the glass didn't move, but his voice did, low and filled with a haunting, profound resonance. "Anyone who still believes we can be forgiven."
Behind him, down the shadowed hall, the west wing door, which she had firmly closed, creaked open on its own, a dark, inviting mouth waiting to swallow them whole.
And somewhere deep in the belly of the house, in its stone heart, the piano started playing again—this time, two notes at once, a dissonant, clashing chord that spoke not of harmony, but of conflict. It was the sound of two stories, two sisters, two truths beginning to violently, irrevocably collide.