Chapter 4 The Unveiling
The basement of the Thorne estate was a labyrinth of humming servers and climate-controlled wine cellars. Jude had spent a fortune "upgrading" the security system, but he had built his fortress on the foundations of my old architecture. He didn’t realize that every smart lock, every hidden camera, and every automated light was still tied to a ghost protocol.
I sat in the dark, my fingers flying across a tablet I had smuggled in. The blue light illuminated the scar on my face, making it look like a jagged lightning bolt.
Access granted.
"Hello, Jude, welcome Nora" I smiled cruelly, as I whispered to the empty room. "Welcome to the haunt game, welcome to your doom, let's play guys"
The next morning, the chaos began.
Nora had turned my old library into a "meditation room," a sanctuary of white silk and expensive crystals. She had replaced all portraits of me, all my writings, books with something, something despicable. I loved to spend to quiet and alone time writing stories, but now all my hardwork was gone. Nora wasn't scared that my ghost would hunt her, she had the nerve to take over my library.
At 3:00 AM, the smart speakers I had installed behind the walls when I was Seraphina began to play a faint, distorted loop. It wasn't music. It was the sound of a shovel hitting wet earth. Thump. Schlick. Thump.
I was in the kitchen at 6:00 AM, calmly whisking egg whites, when Nora stumbled in. She looked terrified, haggard, like she had just seen a ghost and her silk robe stained with spilled wine.
"Did you hear it?" she demanded, clutching the marble island.
"Hear what ma'am, I don't understand ma" I pretended not to hear anything.
"The noise in the walls?" She uttered, looking around and trying to find out what was actually happening.
"Oh, you mean the noise, ma'am?" I asked, tilting my head with wide, innocent eyes. "It was perfectly silent in the servant's wing. Perhaps it’s the settling of the house? Or the willow tree scratching at the windows?"
Nora’s face went ash-white. "The willow..." She stammered. I could see confusion written all over her.
By noon, I was in Jude’s study while he and his wife were away. He was at the office, but his desktop was synced to the house. I didn't steal his money or expensive jeweleries but I planned something deadly for him. What I did was much more surgical.
I opened his private ledger and adjusted a few decimal points in his accounts. Then, I sent an anonymous, encrypted email to his lead auditor. It contained just one image: a scan of the original, un-forged Power of Attorney document I had kept in a digital cloud vault they never would have imagined .
As I was finishing, the door creaked.
I whipped around, my heart thundering. Jude was standing right there, his tie loosened, looking like a man who hadn't slept for days.
"What are you doing at my desk, Mira?" his voice firm but dangerously low.
I held up a feather duster, my hands trembling, from the sheer adrenaline of wanting to kill him. "I... I was dusting the monitor, sir. It was covered in fingerprints and dust."
He walked toward me, his presence suffocating. He grabbed my wrist, his grip bruising me. "Sir please let me go" I uttered but he even tightened the grip he had on me. "You have a strange way of moving. You don't walk like a maid. You walk like someone who owns the floor they stand on. You walk with so much audacity"
He leaned in, his eyes searching mine. For a terrifying second, I thought the game was up.
"The scar," he muttered, his thumb brushing the line on my cheek. "Where did you say you got it?"
"A betrayal, sir," I said, my voice dropping the raspy tremor for just a second. "Someone I loved tried to bury me. But I’m harder to kill than I look."
Jude flinched, his grip loosening. He looked at me as if he were seeing a monster in a dream. Before he could speak, his phone vibrated. It was Nora. I could hear her screaming through the receiver about a video that had just started playing on every television in the house.
Jude ran to the living room and I followed at a respectful distance, fading into the shadows of the hallway.
On the seventy-five-inch screen, a grainy, black-and-white video was playing. It was a loop of me, Saraphina, sitting in this very room five years ago, laughing and blowing a kiss to the camera.
“I love you so much, Jude” my voice echoed through the house, amplified by the surround-sound system. “An I trust you with my life.”
"Turn it off!" Jude roared, fumbling for the remote. But I had locked the controls.
"It won't stop!" Nora wailed, clutching her head. "Jude, she’s here! She’s in the walls! She everything, I can feel her presence, I can smell her perfume, I am almost running mad Jude" she stammered in a panic."
In the middle of the panic, Jude turned and looked at me. I was standing perfectly still, like a ghost in a black apron. I let a tiny, sharp smile slip onto my face—just for him. Just to scare him.
His eyes widened, and his hands trembled. The recognition hit him like a physical blow. He didn't know how, but somehow he knew it was me.
"You," he breathed, his face turning a sickly shade of grey.
"The tea is getting cold, sir," I said, my voice now perfectly clear, perfectly Saraphina. "And I need to get back to work"
