chapter five

Chapter Five

The Room Behind the Piano

Sienna never forgot Damien’s warning.

“There’s a room in this house. Locked. Everyone says it doesn’t exist. Don’t ever go near it.”

But those words had the opposite effect.

She couldn’t stop thinking about it.

Where was it? Why was it locked?

And why did Damien look terrified when he mentioned it?

She began to observe more closely.

The mansion was ancient, too large for one family. Hallways stretched like veins, and there were places no one ever went—dusty corridors, creaking stairwells, doors sealed shut as though the very air behind them had been forgotten.

And then she noticed something strange.

The piano.

It sat in the east wing. Elegant, black, and untouched.

One afternoon, while dusting the baseboards (a chore she was still expected to do as if she were a maid, not a wife), she noticed the pattern of the floor tiles beneath the piano didn’t match the rest of the marble flooring.

Curious, she knelt and traced the edges.

Hollow.

Her heart thumped.

Later that night, when everyone had gone to sleep, she crept back to the east wing. The silence was thick. Her hands shook as she pushed the piano just enough to reveal a faint seam in the wall behind it.

A door.

No knob. No keyhole.

But there was a symbol—a carved insignia in the wood. A serpent coiled around a rose.

Westwood's old crest.

She placed her palm on it.

The wall clicked.

And the door slid open.

---

Inside, dust floated in the air like forgotten memories. The room was dim, lit only by the sliver of moonlight coming from a high window.

A single bed.

A child’s bookshelf.

Posters of vintage cars.

A cracked guitar in the corner.

And on the desk—

A stack of untouched birthday cards.

“Happy 17th, Dante.”

“We miss you, come back home.”

“You’re still a Westwood, even if you’re gone.”

Sienna’s breath caught.

This wasn’t a storage room.

It was a shrine.

Dante’s room. Preserved. Frozen in time.

She walked deeper, gently touching the desk. Then something caught her eye—a thick leather journal, tucked beneath an old toy car.

She opened it.

---

May 14th

“They don’t know. No one knows. I saw the file. Dad paid them off. The crash was covered. But Damien... he blames himself. He shouldn’t.”

May 23rd

“Eleanor said if I disappear, Damien can finally become heir. Maybe that’s what they all want. Maybe that’s why no one cares what really happened.”

June 3rd

“They keep watching me. I think someone’s been reading my journal.”

June 5th

“If anything happens to me, it wasn’t an accident.”

---

The final entry stopped her heart.

June 10th

“They told me to leave town. To go overseas and never return. They gave me a new name. But this isn’t my choice. This is exile.”

He didn’t die?

He was forced to leave?

Her head spun.

Then—

The door slammed behind her.

She gasped and spun around.

Damien stood in the doorway, shadowed and unreadable.

“You weren’t supposed to find this room,” he said.

Sienna clutched the journal. “Damien… he’s alive, isn’t he?”

He didn’t respond.

Instead, he stepped inside and locked the door behind him.

“You want to know everything?” he said. “Then you better be ready for the truth.”

---

Flashback — Six Years Ago

The Westwood mansion was a battlefield.

Dante Westwood had always been the golden boy. Charismatic. Gifted. Loved.

But he made one mistake.

He fell in love with the wrong girl.

And she was promised to someone else—

To Damien.

Eleanor Westwood had made that deal with her family long ago.

Damien never cared about her, but to the Westwoods, bloodlines mattered. Mergers mattered. And Dante's heart got in the way of legacy.

So Eleanor gave him a choice.

Leave… or be buried under the weight of a scandal that would ruin everything.

And Damien?

He watched it all happen.

He watched them tear his brother apart.

He watched his mother cover up the truth.

He watched his father erase Dante from existence.

And he did nothing.

---

Back in the present

“I was a coward,” Damien whispered.

Sienna stared at him. “Why didn’t you go after him?”

“Because he told me not to,” Damien said, voice cracking. “He said if I stayed, I could protect what he left behind.”

“What did he leave behind?”

Damien looked at her like the answer was obvious.

“Me.”

---

For the first time, she saw Damien—not as the cold, vicious man who slept around and ignored her—but as the broken boy who watched his brother be exiled to protect him.

Everything made sense now.

The self-destruction.

The anger.

The obsession with control.

Because deep down… Damien hated himself.

---

“I’m not supposed to care about you,” Damien murmured, stepping closer. “But I do. That’s why I keep pushing you away. Because I destroy everything I care about.”

“You won’t destroy me,” Sienna whispered.

He stared at her, eyes dark with guilt, pain, longing.

And then, for the first time—

He didn’t walk away.

He pulled her into his arms and buried his face in her neck.

But Sienna didn’t smile.

Because she knew something he didn’t.

When she opened Dante’s journal… one page had been missing.

A page torn out.

And whoever tore it out… was still watching them both.