Return Of The Ghost

Lily’s POV

While I should have been grieving my family, mourning the parents I watched die and the sister who bled out in my arms, I was in a restroom stall getting fucked from behind by the man I came back to destroy, and God help me, I never wanted him to stop.

His hand was fisted in my hair, pulling just enough to make my back arch. My palms were flat against the cold tile, my knees barely holding me up as he drove into me again and again, like he had been starving for this without knowing it. Every part of me should have felt disgust. Instead I felt full, wanted, alive in a way I hadn’t let myself feel in five years.

That should have scared me more than it did.

Three weeks earlier, I hadn’t touched him. Three weeks earlier, I could still call myself in control.

*********

They had shot my father first. Then my mother. Then Clara. I was only seventeen, and I should have died with them.

Instead, I heard a name whispered in the dark before everything went black.

Adrian Hastings.

Five years later, I was flying back into the city that took everything from me.

“Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Calderm City. The local time is 9:45 a.m. Please remain seated until the seatbelt sign is switched off.”

The hostess’s voice came through the speakers, and everyone around me started moving, unbuckling seatbelts, reaching for their bags. I sat still for a moment, staring at the seat in front of me. My chest felt tight. This was it. I was really back.

When the light went off, I got up slowly, clutching my bag close to me. The people around me looked normal, tired parents with kids, businesspeople on their phones, tourists with neck pillows. None of them knew that for me, this wasn’t just another flight. This was me walking back into the past I had spent five years running from.

Stepping off the plane, the rush of air from the jet bridge hit me, and my heart thudded harder than it had in years. Calderm City. The city where I had once been happy. The city where I lost everything. The city where I had died, at least in the eyes of the world.

I kept my sunglasses on as I walked through the airport lobby. Nobody gave me a second look the way they used to. No cameras. No one calling my name. No family waiting at the doors.

The only person standing there was Charles, my assistant, in an all-black suit with his collar buttoned tight.

“Welcome back, ma’am,” he said softly, holding the car door open. “C’mon in.”

The way he held it reminded me of my father, who used to do the same while my mother, Clara, and Damian waited in the car to pull me into a hug the second I got close. I stood there a moment too long, my eyes fixed on the empty seats, fighting back tears no one could see under my shades.

“Thank you,” I said, my voice smaller than I meant it to be.

Charles shut the door and moved to the front. The car pulled off.

“Where are we headed?” I asked, though I already knew what I wanted.

“The penthouse, ma’am. One of the properties you built while you were away.”

“I want to see the family house,” I said.

Charles hesitated, his eyes flicking to me in the mirror. “Ma’am… the house was torn down last year. It’s farmland now.”

“What?” I met his eyes. “What did you just say?”

“Adrian Hastings bought it. It’s fields now. Cotton, wool, silk, flax, for fabric.”

My chest went tight. He had the nerve to buy my father’s land and turn it into something for his own company. Charles still sometimes asked if I was sure Adrian was behind the massacre. At this point I should have cried, but nothing came. Only the same cold weight that never left me.

“Take me to the mansion instead,” I said.

The staff greeted me warmly when we arrived, and I told Charles to have most of them moved to the penthouse or the company. Living like an heiress with a house full of workers wasn’t going to help me walk into Adrian’s company looking like nobody.

I went straight to my room and dropped onto the bed. This city was full of my family’s ghosts, and I hated being back in it. But I hadn’t come this far to sit around feeling sorry for myself. I pulled out my laptop and opened Adrian Atelier’s website.

There was a listing for a data analyst. It wasn’t glamorous, but it would get me inside his walls, close enough to watch him, close enough to plan. For five years I had built exactly what I needed for this moment: five degrees, a company of my own with more money behind it than most people would see in a lifetime, and a face nobody in this city would recognize. All of it, for this.

I filled out the application without letting myself think too hard about it, attached the resume I’d built under the name Lily Nolan, and hit send before I could talk myself out of it.

“Five years,” I murmured, “of nothing but this.”

I set the laptop aside and let my eyes fall shut.

I was back in our house. It was my seventeenth birthday, and everyone was there except Damian, who hadn’t arrived yet. The cake was cut, and the wine poured despite his absence. Laughter filled the room as they sang to me. Then something popped.

My father’s head split open as the men stormed in.

My mother fought them and took a bullet for it. Clara and I screamed, thinking it was over, until they dragged her toward them. They took turns with her while I begged. Then they shot her too.

They meant to kill me next, but my body gave out before they could; the dark swallowing me first. They must have thought I was already gone, because they left. But before they did, I heard a name pass between them.

Adrian Hastings.

I didn’t understand it then. All I knew was that he had once been my father’s best friend, before something turned their friendship into a grave.

I woke to my phone buzzing on the nightstand. An unknown number, gone before I could answer it. A minute later, a message came through.

It was an interview invite from Adrian Atelier.

A slow smile spread across my face.

The universe was finally on my side.