The sky broke open five minutes before she arrived.

It wasn’t a storm, not exactly—just a slow, deliberate mourning from above. Rain smeared the windshield like grief with no hands to hold it, and the wipers groaned against a rhythm too ancient to tame. Briar Elwood squinted through the wet blur as the skeletal trees thickened, framing the road in crooked silhouettes.

Somewhere beyond the forest’s grasp, the house waited.

She hadn’t set foot near Blackthistle Manor in nearly eighteen years. Not since the incident. Not since they'd dragged her out screaming, clutching her sketchbook, too young to know what memory was and too old to pretend it wasn’t real.

Her mother had died here. Her aunt too.

And now it belonged to her.

She parked at the iron gates, their paint peeling like dead skin. As her boots hit the gravel, the hush of the woods felt… wrong. Not quiet. Listening.

Blackthistle rose behind the gate like something out of a fevered painting—spires clawing at the sky, ivy strangling the stone, windows blind with age. Three stories. West wing sealed. A gutted greenhouse. And somewhere beneath it all, catacombs that no architect ever admitted to building.

The lawyer had called it a “restoration project.”

She called it what it was:

A dare from the dead.

The house opened for her like a mouth.

Old brass hinges sighed as she stepped inside, her breath fogging in the chill. Dust draped over furniture like ghosts too polite to leave. A grandfather clock in the hallway ticked out of rhythm—as if it resented keeping time for someone like her.

And still, she stepped deeper in.

Into the foyer. Past the staircase. Toward the drawing room she wasn’t supposed to remember but somehow did. That was where her mother played piano. Where the fire once started. Where—

The floor creaked.

Not behind her.

Below.

She froze.

The chandelier above stilled as if holding its breath, and somewhere within the bones of the manor, a low vibration thrummed like a heartbeat misplaced.

She laughed it off. She had to.

Too much black coffee. Too little sleep.

But that night… the walls spoke back.

Not clearly. Not words. Just the whisper of nails on plaster. The hush of cloth dragging along the floor outside her door. The air shifted wrong. She didn’t scream. Screaming never helped here.

Instead, she pressed her back against the bedroom door, eyes wide in the candlelight, heart slamming so hard she almost missed it:

A voice.

Soft.

Male.

Murmuring from behind the wall.

“You shouldn’t have come back, Briar.”

Two Days Later:

She found the passage.

It wasn’t a hallway.

It was a throat carved into the wall behind the library—cold, narrow, littered with feathers and rusted hairpins. It spiraled down beneath the manor, into what she thought was cellar space. Instead, it led to rooms.

Rooms that weren’t listed in blueprints.

Cots. Books. A cracked mirror. And a piano—ancient and out of tune.

She didn’t mean to cry.

But the moment she touched the keys, the air changed.

And from the far corner of the dark:

He spoke.

“You’re afraid of me?” he said from the shadows.
Briar’s breath trembled.
“No,” she whispered.
“Then why are you wet between your thighs… and praying I don’t come closer?”

The candle she held flickered.

The space between them was electric and wrong and inevitable.

He stepped into the light.

And smiled like he'd seen her in every nightmare she’d ever tried to forget.

~TO BE CONTINUED....🥀🖤