Novels by stellaidopise164

(Adrian's pov)There was no good version of being found.I understood that in the half-second after Julian's voice came down the stairwell, easy and pleasant and entirely too casual for a man who'd just located three people who were supposed to be scattered around the house minding their own business. Sienna's hand found my wrist in the dark, a single sharp pulse of pressure waited and beside me I heard Elena's breath go thin and careful, the practiced stillness of someone who'd already learned, once tonight, exactly what happened when you weren't quiet enough."Sienna, darling." Julian's voice again, closer now, unhurried footsteps on the stone stairs. "I know you're down there. Bring your new friend up Mother's waiting."Sienna's grip on my wrist didn't loosen, but I felt something shift in her, a recalibration, the sound of a mind working fast and cold under pressure. When she spoke, her voice had transformed entirely lighter, brittle, pitched to carry exactly the right amount of

(Adrian's pov)The servants' wing hadn't been used in decades, not by the look of it dust thick enough to hold footprints, sheets draped over furniture like the house was in permanent mourning for people who'd never been allowed to be remembered properly. Sienna moved through it with the ease of someone who'd walked it a hundred times in the dark, flashlight low, steps silent on floorboards that should have creaked and somehow didn't.We found Elena in the third room we tried.She was alive. That was the first thing I registered, the relief of it hitting harder than I'd expected. She was curled on a narrow, dust-sheeted cot, wrists bound in front of her with a plain cord, not cruel exactly, not designed to hurt, just designed to hold. Her eyes came up sharp and frightened at the flashlight beam, then flooded with something closer to disbelief when she saw who was holding it."Sienna." Her voice cracked on the name. "You came.""Of course I came." Sienna was already crouched beside the

(Adrian's pov)I didn't answer her right away.Standing in a stone passage forty steps beneath a house full of people who'd just lied to my face over soup, with a brass plate reading Nursery mounted on rock that had never held a crib in its life, I understood that whatever I said next wasn't going to be the kind of thing I could take back."Working for you," I said, "would mean what, exactly.""It would mean you stop reporting to Margaux's assistant every evening." Sienna said it evenly, like she'd known about those calls the entire time, which I realized, with the particular vertigo of a man discovering he'd been watched more closely than he'd watched she probably had. "It would mean you help me instead of investigating around me. And it would mean, when this is over, you don't get to decide you didn't know what you were part of.""I haven't decided anything yet.""No." Something in her face eased, very slightly not warmth, not yet, but the loosening of a person who'd expected a wors

(Adrian's pov)Elena Duval didn't come down for breakfast.I noticed it the way I noticed most things now sideways, without seeming to, over the rim of a coffee cup while Julian talked about nothing in particular and Corinne laughed at the nothing a half-beat late. It wasn't unusual, on its own. Sienna never came down either. But Elena had come down every morning since I'd arrived, punctual in a way that felt deliberate, like she wanted to be seen keeping a schedule the rest of the house didn't bother with."Late start for Miss Duval," I said, mildly, watching the table rather than any one face."She does that," Corinne said quickly too quickly, the words arriving before the thought fully had. "Sleep in. She's on holiday, after all."Margaux said nothing. She buttered a piece of toast with the unhurried precision of a woman performing a ritual rather than eating a meal, and didn't look up, and something about the specific quality of her silence made the coffee in my stomach go cold.I

Chapter Two :Rooms Not on the Map(Adrian pov)Outside, the snow kept falling, patient and endless, and somewhere in the walls of Wraithmoor Lodge, a house built to close in on itself finished closing. By the third morning, I'd stopped pretending the job I'd been hired for and the job I was actually doing were the same thing.Officially, I spent my days walking the property with a tablet and a checklist, noting camera blind spots, testing door locks, making a show of professional thoroughness for whichever Vale happened to be watching. Julian liked to walk with me for the first ten minutes of each circuit before he got bored and drifted off to wherever men like Julian drifted off to. Margaux never watched at all; she simply knew, somehow, everywhere I'd been, the way a woman knows the layout of a house she's owned her whole life without needing to check.Unofficially, I was building a second map. The one the family hadn't given me.Wraithmoor's floor plan, the version in my file, sho

Adrian's povThe road to Wraithmoor Lodge ended the way most warnings did beautifully, and too late to matter.I watched it unspool through the windshield of the hired Range Rover, a thin gray ribbon cut into white nothing, flanked on both sides by pines so heavy with snow they looked like they were bowing to something. The driver, a taciturn local named Bruno, hadn't spoken in eleven kilometers. I didn't mind. I'd learned a long time ago that silence told you more about a place than a guidebook ever could, and the silence out there had a particular quality to it, not empty, exactly. Attentive."How much longer?" I asked anyway, because some habits didn't care what I'd learned.My name is Adrian Wolfe and I am 34 years old. I'm tall, broad-shouldered, dark hair kept short and practical; I have a weathered, angular face that looks used to weather and bad news in equal measure; carries old, faint scars consistent with fieldwork, I don't discuss. I Dresses plainly dark, functional clo