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The Collection"
publish date:
2026-11-01 14:42:32
Latest chapter
INHERITED SIN Priya's Warning
He didn't sleep that night, and by morning he'd talked himself into believing he'd imagined the light — some trick of exhaustion and paranoia, a reflection off something in the hallway he'd mistaken for a lamp switching on behind a locked door. It was easier to believe that than to sit with the alternative, which was that someone had been standing on the other side of that door, close enough to hear him crouched there, and had chosen, deliberately, to let him know it.He went to Priya's office that afternoon, not entirely sure what he was hoping to get from her, only that she was the one person in this house who'd shown him something close to genuine, unguarded sympathy since he'd arrived — the flicker of it in her office weeks ago, the careful way she'd chosen her words about his father without ever fully closing the door on the subject the way everyone else did.She was at her desk when he came in, the monitors glowing their usual low light, and something in her posture when she loo
INHERITED SIN The Locked Room
He found the door almost by accident, three days after Théo's unfinished sentence had lodged itself permanently somewhere behind Kian's sternum, refusing to dislodge no matter how many times he turned it over.He'd been sent to retrieve something from a storage closet on the main house's second floor — an errand simple enough that he hadn't bothered asking anyone to walk him through the unfamiliar hallway, confident enough by now in his growing sense of the property's layout. He took a wrong turn somewhere past the second landing, ending up in a narrow corridor he didn't recognize, lined with closed doors that all looked, at a glance, like unremarkable guest rooms.Except one.It sat at the end of the hall, slightly recessed from the others, and something about it made Kian slow his steps without quite understanding why. The door itself looked older than the ones around it, the wood darker, more weathered, as though it had survived some renovation the rest of the hallway had gone thro
INHERITED SIN Needling
Théo found him again a few days later, in almost exactly the same way he had the first time — appearing in a doorway Kian hadn't heard him approach, leaning against the frame with the easy, practiced posture of someone who'd never once in his life worried about being unwelcome anywhere."You look terrible," Théo said, by way of greeting. "Whatever my brother's been feeding you emotionally this week, I'd recommend a different diet.""Long week," Kian said, not looking up from the folder he was pretending to organize."They're all long weeks, in this house. You'll notice the pattern eventually." Théo wandered in, uninvited as always, and this time he set something down on the desk in front of Kian before he'd even fully sat — a small, worn pocketknife, its handle scratched with age, resting there like an offering, or a test."What's this.""A gift. Sort of." Théo dropped into the chair across from him, feet immediately kicking up onto the corner of the desk, an act of casual disrespect
INHERITED SIN Pushing Back
He waited two days before raising it with Dario, partly out of some instinct that the timing needed to be right, and partly because Dario himself remained largely unreachable, buried in whatever crisis had cut the warehouse visit short and never fully explained itself since. When the opportunity finally came — a rare quiet evening, Dario alone in his office with the door uncharacteristically open — Kian didn't let himself hesitate."I need to talk to you about the collection," he said, stepping inside without waiting for an invitation.Dario looked up from his desk, something wary crossing his face at the tone. "Mara mentioned you handled yourself well. Didn't interfere.""I wanted to. The man you had them collect from — he was terrified before anyone even raised a hand. And then someone did anyway, and I just stood there and watched it happen because I was told to.""That's the job," Dario said, not unkindly, but without softening it either. "I told you from the beginning there would
INHERITED SIN The Collection"
Whatever threat had cut the warehouse visit short kept Dario occupied for the better part of a week, meetings running late into the night, his usual stillness replaced by a coiled, watchful tension that seemed to spread through the whole house like weather. Kian saw less of him during that stretch than he had since arriving, and when Mara finally handed him a new assignment on the eighth day, he understood it less as an honor and more as a way of keeping him occupied while the actual adults handled whatever was actually wrong."You're shadowing a collection today," Mara said, handing him a jacket that wasn't his and didn't fit quite right. "Watch. Don't talk. Don't touch anything. This is the part of the job nobody tells you about in the brochure, so consider this your orientation."The address belonged to a modest rowhouse on the edge of the city Kian wouldn't have looked at twice under any other circumstances — chipped paint, a sagging porch step, a wind chime clattering somewhere o
INHERITED SIN Rare Humor
The two men outside the warehouse door straightened as Dario stepped out of the car, and for a moment Kian simply sat there, hand still on his own door handle, watching through the window as Dario exchanged a few quiet words with them, his posture unreadable in the dark.Kian got out when it became clear no one was going to invite him to sit in the car alone in this part of the city. The night air smelled like rust and river water, and somewhere beyond the warehouse's dark silhouette he could hear the low industrial hum of machinery running in a neighboring building, unattended, indifferent to the hour."What is this place," he asked, coming up beside Dario."Patience," Dario said, though something in his voice had softened again, the earlier tension of the car ride easing now that they'd actually arrived somewhere. "You'll see soon enough."They hadn't taken more than two steps toward the door when Dario stumbled, slightly, over a loose section of gravel Kian hadn't even noticed, and
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