Part 2 — The Red Book

“Elena?”

The name left him before he could keep it. Mia’s fingers тιԍнтened on the sleeve. The baby stirred against her back and did not wake. He crossed to the carved panel beside the case and set his palm where memory said the catch should be. Nothing gave.

“The lady said the red book opens it.”

He looked at her. She pointed at the highest shelf — one crimson spine among the hundreds. He pulled. A mechanism clicked somewhere in the wall. The bookcase shifted forward on a breath of cold air that did not belong to the study.

“Stay here.”

“No.” She surprised him with the speed of it. “My mama is in there.”

“What did you say?”

Tears stood and did not fall. “Mr. Vincent told Mama she had to clean downstairs tonight. Then he brought us here. He said she would lose her job if I didn’t finish your study.”

Vincent. His father’s attorney since before Roman had been old enough to sit in on the meetings. Roman went through the opening. A narrow stair dropped under the house. At the bottom a steel door stood already open.

Grace was tied to a chair. Beside her, a thin woman lifted her face. Silver in the dark hair. Seventeen years on the mouth and the eyes. Not enough to make her someone else.

“Elena.”

His sister cried the way a person cries when the door is real. Grace’s voice came out raw. “Roman. Don’t believe anything Vincent tells you.”

Footsteps on the stair. Slow. Measured. Vincent at the top with a pistol, and the barrel not on Roman. Past his shoulder. On Elena.

“You should have stayed ᴅᴇᴀᴅ.”

Elena laughed. Not fear. Something closer to arrival. She looked at her brother and the triumph thinned to a whisper.

“Roman. Vincent isn’t the one who locked me here.”

His stomach тιԍнтened. “Then who?”

The smile left her.

“Your mother.”

Grace gasped behind him. Their mother had been ᴅᴇᴀᴅ twenty-two years. Funeral. Stone. A story the house did not revise.

Above them, on the study floor, someone began to walk toward the open bookcase. Unhurried. Heels on wood. Mia’s small hand was still on Roman’s sleeve, the baby asleep between her shoulder blades, and the red book lay on the rug where he had dropped it — the only bright thing in a room that had just remembered how to open.