FORGOTTEN ROOM

The journal sits on Marco's desk for three days before anyone can make sense of half of what is written in it. The leather is worn, the pages yellowed with age, the handwriting sometimes too faint to read.

Elena keeps coming back to look at it anyway, like the answers might finally show up if she stares hard enough.

She sits in the chair beside Marco's desk, her elbows on her knees, her chin resting on her hands. Her eyes move across the pages, searching for something she has missed.

The ink blurs in places. The dates jump around. But every time she looks, she sees the same words. Victor. Foundation. Money. Proof. If anything happens to me.

"There's a page missing," Marco says, flipping through it again, frowning. He holds the journal up to the light, examining the spine. "Right here. See the edge? Torn out clean."

Elena leans over his shoulder. Her stomach tightens.

She can see the ragged edge where the paper was ripped, not cut, but torn quickly, roughly. "What was on it?"

"No way to know." Marco taps the ragged edge along the spine. "Whatever your father wrote there, somebody did not want it read."

He looks up at her, his eyes serious. "Could've been him. Could've been whoever searched that study before we got there."

Elena sits back in her chair. Her mind races. "So we go back."

Dante looks up from the papers he has been sorting through at the other end of the table. His eyes narrow. "Back to the estate?"

"There is more there. I can feel it." She does not fully know how to explain the feeling.

Only that it has been sitting in her chest since they left, something unfinished, something waiting. "That house has more rooms than we even looked in. We were only there a few hours."

"It is not safe to keep going back," Dante says. "Not if someone else already knows what is there. Not if Adrian's people are watching."

"That is exactly why we need to go now." Elena's voice is firm. "Before they finish looking. Before they find whatever we missed."

He studies her for a second, then sighs, already knowing he is not going to win this one. "Fine. Tomorrow. Gabriel comes with us this time."

---

The house feels different in the morning light. Less like a tomb, more like a place somebody used to actually live in.

The sun filters through the dirty windows, casting pale yellow squares on the dusty floor. The ivy outside casts shifting shadows on the walls.

Elena walks through it slower this time, less overwhelmed, more purposeful. She takes in the details she missed before. The crack in the marble floor near the front door.

The faded wallpaper in the hallway. The smell of old wood and forgotten things.

"Where haven't we checked?" Gabriel asks, scanning the hallway. His eyes move methodically, cataloguing every door, every corner, every shadow.

"Upstairs," Elena says. "We only did the ground floor last time."

They climb the wide staircase together. Dust rises in soft clouds with every step, catching the light like tiny particles of gold. The stairs creak under their weight. The banister is smooth under Elena's hand, worn by years of use.

The upstairs hallway is lined with more closed doors than Elena remembers from any photograph, any story Sofia has ever told her. The wallpaper is floral, faded pink, peeling in places.

A long runner carpet covers the floor, threadbare in the middle.

"This was my room?" she asks, pausing at a door with a small brass plaque, worn but still legible. E.R.

"Probably." Dante pushes the door open gently.

Inside, everything is small and faded. A child's bed with a lace canopy gone gray with dust. A shelf of books she does not recognize the titles of.

A rocking horse tipped on its side in the corner, like it fell over one day and nobody ever came back to right it. A small wooden chair by the window, its paint chipped and peeling. A rag doll lying on the floor, one button eye missing.

Elena stands in the doorway a long moment, something aching quietly in her chest. The dust motes dance in the sunlight. The room is frozen in time, a moment trapped forever.

"I don't remember any of this," she says softly. Her voice sounds strange in the small room.

"You were young when your mother passed. This might be from before that." Dante steps inside carefully. His footsteps are quiet on the old wooden floor. "Sofia said your father kept your room exactly as it was. Never let anyone touch it."

"Why would he do that?" Elena's voice cracks slightly.

"Grief does strange things to people." Dante picks up the rocking horse, sets it upright gently, like it matters that it is standing correctly again. "Some people cannot let go of a room because letting go feels like losing the person all over again."

Elena runs her fingers along the edge of the small bed. Dust coats her fingertips. The fabric of the canopy is brittle, crumbling slightly under her touch.

"It's sad," she says. "All of it just sitting here for ten years, waiting for someone who was never going to come back."

"You came back," Gabriel says from the doorway. His voice is quiet, matter-of-fact. "Just took a while."

Something about the way he says it, plain, no softness dressed around it, makes her throat tighten. She blinks back the tears that threaten to fall.

"Yeah," she says. "I guess I did."

---

They find the forgotten room by accident, almost.

Elena notices it first. A stretch of hallway wall that seems slightly too short compared to the room on the other side of it. She stops walking, backtracking a few steps, studying the wallpaper like it might explain itself.

The wallpaper is pale blue, patterned with tiny white flowers. It looks like it belongs in a child's room. But there is something off about it. A slight bulge near the corner. A faint line that does not quite match the pattern.

"Something's wrong here," she says.

Dante comes back to stand beside her. He studies the wall, his eyes narrowing. "What do you mean?"

"This hallway. It's too short." She paces it out, counting steps under her breath. "The room past my father's study should be bigger than this. There's space missing. A whole room's worth of space."

Gabriel runs a hand along the wall. He presses here and there, his fingers moving methodically, until something gives beneath his palm with a soft, hollow click.

A section of wallpapered panel swings inward. It moves silently, smoothly, like it has been waiting to be opened. Behind it is a narrow door, painted the same color as the wall, designed to disappear completely.

"A hidden room," Gabriel says.

Elena's heart pounds. Her breath catches. "Open it."

Dante pushes the door open slowly. It groans on old hinges, a sound that seems too loud in the quiet house.

The three of them step into a space no bigger than a closet. The air is thick with dust, old and settled. A single small window lets in a slant of gray light, illuminating the particles floating in the air. There is a desk pushed against the far wall, a chair, a locked metal box sitting square in the middle of the desk like it has been waiting exactly there for ten years.

"This is where he really worked," Elena says softly, stepping inside. "Not the study. Here. This is where he hid."

"Makes sense," Dante says. "If he suspected Victor was already watching him, he would not keep the real evidence somewhere obvious. He would hide it. Somewhere only he knew."

Gabriel crouches by the box, examining the lock. His fingers trace its edges. "This is not picking easy. Whoever owned this box did not want it opened."

"We don't need to pick it." Elena crosses the room, running her hand along the underside of the desk drawer. She does not know why she does it. Some instinct she cannot explain drives her fingers forward until they catch on something taped flat against the wood.

A small brass key.

She pulls it free, hands shaking slightly. The key is cold in her palm. Old. Tarnished.

"I don't know how I knew that was there," she whispers.

"Muscle memory," Dante says quietly. He is watching her with something like wonder in his eyes. "Your body remembers things your mind hasn't caught up to yet. It has happened before."

Elena fits the key into the lock with unsteady fingers. It turns with a soft click, and the lid springs open.

Inside: more papers, a stack of photographs, and the missing page from the journal, folded in half and tucked beneath everything else. It is yellowed with age, the edges soft and worn. Her father tucked it here, separate from the rest, protected, safest of all.

Elena unfolds it carefully. Her hands tremble. The handwriting is faster here, less controlled, like it was written in a hurry, maybe in fear. The ink smudges in places, as if the writer was in a rush.

"Read it," Dante says gently.

Her voice shakes as she reads aloud. "Victor knows I have proof. I saw him watching the house yesterday. If something happens to me, Elena must not stay with him. He is not safe. He was never safe. Sofia will know who to trust. Tell her to protect my daughter no matter what it costs."

The room goes silent except for the wind pressing faintly against the small window. No one moves. No one breathes.

"He knew," Elena whispers. "He knew Victor might come for him. He was trying to protect me even then."

"And Victor still took you anyway," Dante says, low, angry on her behalf. "Twisted the one person your father trusted into keeping quiet about it for ten years."

"Sofia didn't know the full truth back then." Elena's hands tighten around the page. "She was young too. She only found out pieces of it later, the same as I'm finding out now."

Gabriel is quiet, sorting through the photographs in the box. He studies each one carefully, his face unreadable. He stops on one, staring at it a moment too long.

"Elena," he says.

"What is it?"

He turns it toward her. A photo of her father standing beside another man she does not recognize. Younger than Adrian is now. Sharp-suited. A half-smile that looks entirely too practiced. His eyes are cold, even in the faded photograph.

"Do you know him?" Dante asks.

Elena stares at the photo. Something faint and uneasy stirs at the edges of her memory, gone before she can grab hold of it. She feels like she has seen that face before, but she cannot place it.

"No," she says. "I don't think so."

Gabriel flips the photo over. On the back, in her father's handwriting: A. Vale. Do not trust.

The air in the small room goes cold.

"That's Adrian," Elena breathes. Her voice is barely a whisper. "My father knew him. Before any of this. Before I even had a name for what he was."

"How?" Dante's voice is tight now, sharp with alarm. "Why would your father have a photo of a man who was not even part of Victor's operation until years later?"

"I don't know." Elena's hands are trembling harder now. The photo nearly slips from her fingers. "But if my father already suspected him, ten years ago, before any of this happened, Adrian has been part of this longer than we thought. Much longer."

Dante takes the photo carefully. He studies the young, smiling face of a man who would go on to erase ten years of a little girl's life without ever once losing that same easy smile.

"This changes things," he says quietly. "If Adrian was already circling your family before Victor even needed him, then this was never just about erasing your memory to protect Victor's secrets."

"Then what was it about?" Elena's voice shakes.

"I don't know yet." Dante's jaw tightens, the photo still clutched in his hand. "But I intend to find out."

Elena looks around the small, forgotten room. Her father's true hiding place. The one thing Victor and his men never managed to find. The truth sitting quietly in the dark for ten patient years, waiting for her to finally come home and claim it.

"He protected this," she says softly. "Even after everything. Even after he must have known how dangerous it was to keep it. He protected it because he knew someday I would need it."

"He was right," Dante says, taking her hand. "You do."

They gather everything carefully. The journal page. The photographs. The metal box itself. Elena takes one last look around the small room before they leave, at the desk her father sat at in secret, working to protect a daughter he would not live to see grow up.

"Thank you," she whispers to the empty room, to the man who is not there to hear it, but somehow, she thinks, might understand anyway.

Then she follows Dante and Gabriel back out into the hallway, back toward the stairs, back toward a truth that is finally starting to look bigger, and far more dangerous, than any of them had first believed.