Chapter 2

Genevieve

I stood at the storage room door with my hand pressed flat against the wood, listening to the sound of my own heartbeat trying to drown out everything else.

The pain hadn't left. It was still there, burning through my ribs like something alive, like something that had been waiting all day for me to stop moving long enough to really feel it. My back ached from hauling crates at dawn. My hands were raw. I'd counted to twenty at the sink four times in the last hour and it had barely helped.

And now this. The door my parents had locked when I was six years old. The door I'd been told never to open, never to ask about, never to go near.

The sound stopped.

I waited. One breath. Two.

Silence.

You're hearing things. You're exhausted. Today happened and your body is breaking down and you're imagining—

Thud.

Not loud. Deliberate. Like someone on the other side had just knocked twice and was waiting for an answer.

I pulled my hand back. Took a step away from the door. Every rational part of my brain was screaming at me to walk away, to go upstairs, to pretend I hadn't heard anything. I'd lost everything today. I was tired enough that hallucinations weren't even that far-fetched.

But I'd heard this sound before.

When I was seven. Maybe six. I'd woken up in the middle of the night and heard knocking from the storage room, steady and rhythmic, like someone trying to get my attention. I'd run to my parents' room and told them someone was trapped.

My father's face had changed. Not scared. Worse than scared. Like he'd been expecting this and had hoped it wouldn't happen.

My mother had carried me back to bed and told me it was just the pipes. Just the old building settling. Just sounds that houses make when they've been standing too long.

The next morning the storage room key was gone from the hook by the back door. It never came back.

I'd asked about it once. Just once. My father had looked at me with something I couldn't name and said, "Some doors are locked for a reason, Genny. Leave it alone."

So I had. For twenty years I'd left it alone. I'd worked around that locked room, stored supplies in the front area, never questioned why a fifteen-by-twenty space in my own building was completely off-limits.

Because my parents had asked me not to. Because they'd always had a reason. Because I trusted them.

But they were gone now. And I was standing here alone with a sound that couldn't be pipes, couldn't be the building settling, couldn't be anything I could explain away.

I went to get my father's toolbox.

This wasn't impulse. I'd fixed the walk-in cooler's compressor three times in the last year. I'd replaced the grinder motor. I'd taken apart the espresso machine so many times I could do it with my eyes closed. I knew how to pry open a sealed panel without damaging the frame. I knew how to work carefully, methodically, like my father had taught me.

I knew how to open things that were meant to stay closed.

The storage room wasn't large. Shelves lined three walls, most of them empty — I'd always assumed my parents kept supplies back here, but now that I was finally inside, there was almost nothing. Just a few dusty boxes pushed into corners, like this space had been abandoned long before they died.

Dust thick enough to show my footprints. The air smelled wrong—not moldy, not stale, but something else. Something I didn't have a word for.

The north wall looked wrong too. I'd never noticed before, but now that I was looking—really looking—the concrete was too clean. No water stains. No marks from where shelves had rested against it for decades. Just smooth gray surface that didn't match the rest of the room.

I moved the last three boxes away from the wall. They were lighter than they should have been. Almost empty. Like someone had already taken what mattered.

Behind them, barely visible under layers of old paint, was a seam. Vertical. Running floor to ceiling, exactly where a doorframe would be if someone had walled over it and tried very hard to make it disappear.

I ran my fingernail along the crack. Felt it catch on something deeper than paint.

Then I knocked on the wall.

The sound that came back was hollow.

Thud.

The answer came immediately. From the other side. Exactly where I'd knocked.

My hands were shaking. Not from the pain this time. From something else entirely.

I thought about my parents. About the way my father had looked at me that morning when I was seven. About how my mother had held me a little too tight when she'd carried me back to bed, like she was afraid something might take me if she let go.

About the storage room key disappearing and never coming back.

Some doors are locked for a reason.

But my parents were gone. The shop was gone. Everything I'd been trying to hold onto had already slipped through my fingers. What was left to protect? What was left to lose?

I picked up the crowbar.

It took twenty minutes to pry the panel loose. The wallboard came away in sections, old and brittle, crumbling at the edges like it had been there longer than I'd been alive. Behind it was a gap—narrow, barely wide enough for someone to stand sideways, extending back maybe two feet before hitting another surface.

A metal box sat on the floor of the gap. Rusted at the corners but intact. No lock.

I pulled it out. Set it on the ground. Opened it.

Inside: a set of keys I didn't recognize, heavier than normal keys, made from metal that looked wrong in the overhead light. A stack of old maps, the paper thick and strange, printed in a way that didn't match any press I'd ever seen. A bundle of my father's handwriting, pages and pages of it, dated across years.

And underneath it all, a hand-drawn diagram of this building. I recognized it immediately—every room, every corner, the layout I'd memorized by heart. My father's sketch, his careful lines, his notes in the margins.

At the bottom of the page, in smaller writing, pressed hard enough to dent the paper:

If she hears it again, don't stop her.

I read it three times. Four. The words didn't change.

If she hears it again.

Not "if the sound comes back." Not "if something goes wrong." If she hears it.

My father had written this knowing I would hear the knocking. Knowing I would eventually stand in this room and try to find out what was making that sound. He'd written instructions for someone—my mother, probably—telling her not to interfere.

Telling her to let me open this door.

I looked up at the north wall. At the clean concrete that didn't match the rest of the storage room. At the vertical seam I could see now that I knew where to look.

The sound came again. Not a knock this time. A grinding noise, metal on stone, like gears turning inside the wall itself.

Click. Click. Click.

The seam widened.

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