Chapter 9 - The Truth in the AtticJulian’s blood ran cold. The voice didn't belong to his mother. It didn't belong to any of the nannies. It was a voice he hadn't heard in two years—a voice he heard in his dreams every single night, whispering to him across the expanse of memory and grief.
Margaux?
"Show yourself!" Julian shouted, his voice cracking with a mixture of terror and desperate hope as he fumbled with his phone flashlight, casting a frantic beam across the dark vault.
The beam cut through the dust motes, sweeping across the rows of glass cases, until it hit the open ventilation shaft.
Scrambling toward the light was not a ghost, and not a phantom—it was a woman. She was wearing an oversized, mud-stained trench coat, her long dark hair matted and tangled, her face gaunt and hollow-eyed. But as she turned her face into the glare of the phone light, Julian staggered backward, hitting a glass display case with a heavy thud.
It was Sarah.
Sarah—Margaux’s younger sister, who had supposedly vanished into a psychiatric facility in Switzerland six months after the funeral, crushed by the grief of losing her sister.
"Sarah?" Julian breathed, his chest heaving as the horrifying reality began to snap into place. "What... what are you doing here? How are you in the house?"
Sarah didn't look like the polished, elegant art gallery owner she used to be. Her eyes were wild, dilated, burning with a manic, desperate energy. She clutched a heavy leather-bound journal to her chest—Margaux’s personal diary.
"You thought I was locked away in Geneva, didn't you, Julian?" Sarah laughed, a sharp, broken sound that echoed off the concrete. "You and your mother paid them to hide me away because I saw what really happened the night Margaux died!"
Julian froze, the room spinning violently. "What are you talking about? She had a brain aneurysm! The autopsy confirmed it! The doctors said it was sudden, natural, unavoidable!"
"The autopsy report your mother paid $50ynth to have rewritten?" Sarah sneered, stepping closer out of the shadows, tears streaming down her hollow cheeks. "Margaux didn't die of an aneurysm, Julian. She was poisoned. Slowly, over three months, with heavy-metal compounds administered in her daily vitamins—vitamins that your dear mother insisted she take for postpartum recovery!"
Julian’s knees buckled. He grabbed the edge of a table to steady himself, the world tilting sideways. "That's... that's a lie. You're insane. You've lost your mind."
"Have I?" Sarah hissed, throwing Margaux’s journal down onto the floor right at Julian’s feet. "Open it! Read the entry from the night before she died! She figured out what your mother was doing. She was going to take the twins and leave you, Julian—because she knew your family was rotting from the inside out!"
Julian dropped to his knees, his trembling hands tearing open the leather journal. The beam of his phone flashlight illuminated Margaux’s frantic, tear-smudged handwriting on the final pages:
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‘Eleanor is trying to destroy me. She wants the children, she wants the estate, and she is poisoning my medicine. Julian is working too much to see it. If anything happens to me, look to the family...’
The paper blurred beneath Julian’s hot, blinding tears. The grief that he had buried, the guilt that had eaten away at his soul for two years, suddenly transformed into something far more terrifying: pure, unadulterated rage.
