Chapter 1
Tilly's POV
Growing up, my parents and brother favored only me, treating my sister Della like a burden. They locked her in the basement and fled overnight with me to Aldermere.
Twenty years later, for the sake of my upcoming wedding, they brought me back to that old house to erase the last traces of her existence.
But none of us expected that Della wasn't dead. Decades had passed, yet she still looked exactly as she did back then. She even followed us to our new home—and right now, she’s sitting quietly on our living room sofa, slowly turning her head to smile at us...
"Tilly, I want to take a trip to Coldbrook to see your childhood home. It might give us some inspiration for the wedding."
The speaker was Auden. He was the heir to the Castellane family and my fiancé, looking deeply at me with his gentle blue eyes.
My mother Corinne’s silver fork clattered against her porcelain plate. The piercing sound shattered the silence of the dining table.
Sitting across from her, my father Hollis stiffened, choking on his red wine and breaking into a violent coughing fit.
Only my brother, Whit, reacted quickly. He picked up his water glass, seamlessly hiding the panic exploding in his eyes, and even managed a polite smile for Auden. "That place has been abandoned for years. There’s really nothing to see."
But Auden wouldn't let it go. "Your family lived there for so many years. Why did you leave in such a hurry? You didn't even sell the house before moving to Aldermere. It must be full of memories. We'll go next week, alright, Tilly?"
My heart was hammering against my ribs.
Coldbrook. That old house.
Beneath that perpetually musty house was a damp basement. And behind its rusted iron door was locked the secret that bought our family’s ticket into high society—and a monster that had almost cost us all our lives.
"Darling..." I forced down the cold sweat on my back and squeezed his hand. "Since you care so much, we'll go next week."
I don't even remember how I survived the rest of that dinner.
The heavy villa doors finally closed behind Auden.
My mother collapsed into her dining chair as if all the bones had been pulled from her body, burying her face in her hands. The terror she had suppressed for twenty years finally erupted into a desperate sob.
"He's going to see it... If he opens that basement... Oh God, we're finished! She's still locked in there..."
"Shut up, Mom!" I stood up abruptly, my voice sharp, cutting off her breakdown. "Locked in there? A demon is locked in there! Did we do something wrong?!"
I gasped for air as the nightmares I had buried for two decades came rushing back.
Auden thought I had a warm, loving childhood. He had no idea that twenty years ago, in that old house in Coldbrook, our family of four almost died.
It was Della. The vicious fraud who was supposedly my sister, but shared not a single drop of Vance blood.
My father clutched his head in agony, his voice trembling. "But if Auden’s people go there and see... that's murder! Everything we have now—our status in Aldermere, Tilly’s marriage—will be destroyed!"
"She got what she deserved!" I gripped the edge of the table, my eyes red. "Have you forgotten? Just because Whit found out she wasn't Dad's biological daughter, she went insane! She spiked our soup with enough rat poison to kill an elephant!"
I yanked up my sleeve, revealing the scar on my wrist—the mark left from endless IV drips when doctors pulled me back from the brink of death.
"If I hadn't eaten less that day, if I hadn't dragged myself out the door in the middle of the night to get help, we would have all rotted in that house! She wasn't your daughter; she was a murderer. She tried to kill us first!"
So, how could anyone blame Whit for locking her in the basement? How could anyone blame us for fleeing the city overnight, throwing her away like garbage, and sealing her forever in that pitch-black cellar?
"Tilly is right."
Whit threw down his napkin and walked coldly to the liquor cabinet, pouring himself a whiskey. He was the pride of the Vance family—always calm, always rational.
He downed half the glass, a ruthless glint in his eyes. "She was a complete lunatic by then. Locking her in the basement was the price she paid for poisoning us. It’s her own fault she starved to death in there."
But for twenty years, that house had been a ticking time bomb. We didn't dare sell it, visit it, or even mention it.
"So what do we do now?" My father was pacing anxiously. "Auden is relentless when he sets his mind to something! If the Castellanes find a rotting corpse in our old house..."
"Then we make sure there isn't even a bone fragment left for them to find."
Whit turned around slowly, a chilling murderous intent in his eyes.
"Whit..." I gasped.
"We go back to Coldbrook tonight," he said, slamming his glass onto the marble bar. "We get rid of the body."
