Chapter 2 - Echoes in the North WingMidnight at the Vale estate was not quiet; it was haunted.
Clara lay on her narrow cot in the small, austere room designated for the staff on the third floor. Her ribs throbbed with every breath, but sleep refused to take her. Her mind raced back to the afternoon. When she had refused to leave, Dominic had said nothing further. He had simply turned on his heel and walked away, leaving her employment hanging by a fragile thread.
At 2:15 AM, a sound cut through the silence of the mansion.
It wasn't a scream this time. It was a rhythmic, haunting tapping. Tap. Tap. Tap.
Clara slipped out of bed, pulling a thin cardigan over her shoulders. She crept out into the darkened hallway. The moonlight filtered through the tall arched windows, casting long, skeletal shadows across the Persian rugs.
The sound was coming from down the hall—closer to the forbidden zone. The north wing.
Mrs. Hargrove’s warning echoed in her head: And you never enter the north wing.
Curiosity, born of desperation and a gut feeling that something was deeply wrong in this house, overrode her common sense. Clara padded silently across the carpet, following the eerie tapping until she reached the heavy oak double doors that sealed off the north wing.
The doors were usually locked. But tonight, they stood ajar by an inch.
A pale line of light cut across the dark floor from within. Clara pressed her eye to the crack.
Inside, the room was vast, lined with towering mahogany bookshelves and covered in dust sheets. But in the center of the room stood Dominic Vale.
He wasn't the cold, untouchable titan of Chicago boardrooms. He was kneeling on the floor, holding a small, blood-stained silver music box. Next to him sat Noah, wide awake, staring blankly at a wall covered in newspaper clippings, photographs, and red yarn.
Clara’s breath hitched.
The clippings weren’t about business deals or stock market crashes. They were all headlines about a single tragic event: "Prominent Attorney’s Wife and Son Targeted in Brutal Highway Ambush."
Except, looking closer at the family photos on the wall, Clara realized something chilling. The dead woman in the photographs wasn't Dominic’s wife.
It was Dominic’s sister. And Noah wasn't Dominic’s son.
He was his nephew. And the "roadside ambush" hadn't been a random tragedy. It had been an assassination.
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Suddenly, a cold metal barrel pressed firmly against the back of Clara’s neck.
"Curiosity," Mrs. Hargrove’s voice whispered in her ear like a death sentence, "is a very expensive habit in this house."
