It was nearly dawn, and the pale, ashen light filtering into the hospital room felt like smoke—thin, heavy, choking. Savannah stared at the slow rise and fall of Colton’s chest where he sat hunched beside her hospital bed, still gripping her hand as if it were the only thing tethering him to the world.His knuckles were bloodless with tension. His eyes, when they finally opened, were drenched with exhaustion—two hollow storms that had weathered too many truths.She didn’t speak right away. The IV in her arm was cold. Her body was drained, wrung out, but her mind was coiled tightly around everything she couldn’t unsee: the silhouette of Magnolia in the woods, the blood-stained pacifier in the box, the second child that no one had spoken of until now.“I dreamed I drowned in roses,” she murmured. “They weren’t red. They were black. And every petal whispered your name.”Colton blinked. “You were burning up. You had a fever—”“Stop protecting me, Colton.” Her voice cracked. “Stop hiding b
Savannah didn’t remember collapsing.One moment, she stood in the hallway, still tasting the metallic panic of Magnolia’s voice on the recorder. The next, the walls buckled and the chandelier above her tilted like a pendulum—each light flickering as if mocking her fragility. Then darkness washed over her like a silk shroud.She came to only briefly on the cold marble floor, someone’s hand brushing her cheek, a voice—Rhett’s—calling her name with terrified urgency. “Savannah, stay with me. You’re burning up.”But she didn’t want to stay. Her body wasn’t her own. The child growing within her, her fractured thoughts, the haunted house, the whispers, the roses—dead and buried—she wanted to run. She wanted to unravel.When Rhett scooped her up in his arms and carried her out past the looming shadow of the estate, her body surrendered completely.At the hospital, fluorescent lights buzzed in an angry chorus above her. The cold stabbed her skin like icewater. A nurse strapped a monitor to he
It began with a sound that didn't belong.Savannah stirred from uneasy sleep, tangled in silk sheets and sweat-slick skin, her senses slow to catch up with reality. A distant, rhythmic drip had pulled her from the dark. Not the erratic clatter of rain, not the whir of faulty plumbing—but something far more deliberate. Measured. Like time counting backward.She sat up slowly, head aching as though someone had threaded iron through her thoughts in the night. She pressed her hand against her temple, trying to decipher the source. The sound called her like a whisper. She slid from the bed, the cold tile shocking her bare feet awake.Drip…She followed it to the bathroom, where the light flickered once before illuminating the mirror—fogged at the corners, though no shower had been run. Her reflection appeared pale, stretched thin across the silvered surface like a ghost of herself. She leaned in closer, and that’s when she heard it again.Drip.She dropped to her knees and opened the cabin
The night sky carried a chill when Savannah resurfaced from the garden, her hands trembling beneath the weight of the box. Moonlight filtered through broken trellises, casting filaments of light on her coat. The hush of the estate was deeper than sleep—it was waiting.Inside her study, she set the box on the polished oak desk. She kept her distance, breath caught, heart drumming like a warhorse. The box was old—weathered brass hinges, dark wood spotted with mold. She had cleaned it with trembling fingers, wiping away a decade of dust as though hoping to erase what lay inside.With a single breath, she lifted the lid.A cloud of must and memory rose.Inside were tiny leather shoes—soft, faded, the soles thinned from daylight never swallowed. One pair scuffed, the other pristine. A photograph lay beneath them: two babies in plain gowns, their heads shaved, swaddled together, reaching for each other’s wrists like twin souls tethered before birth. Magnolia’s handwriting curled on the back
Savannah couldn’t remember when the house began to hum.Not in a mechanical way—no, not like the polite murmur of an old estate adjusting to weather and time. This was something more organic, more deliberate. A presence, as though the air itself had developed a rhythm, a breath. The long corridors exhaled cool drafts behind her neck. Shadows gathered too long beneath the doorways. She told herself she was imagining it. But then, late at night, with the marble floors cold beneath her feet, she heard it.Magnolia’s voice.A whisper so soft it curled at the edge of her consciousness, always just behind her. Savannah. Sometimes it was sharper: He knows. Or strangled: I begged him. She turned—again and again—and found nothing but the black glass of the hallway mirror, her own eyes wide and unblinking.In the bedroom, she sat at the foot of the bed with her arms wrapped around her belly, her fingertips pressed lightly as though the child inside might recognize her touch and anchor her to re
The morning bled through the gauzy curtains like something wounded, muted and aching, a sickly light that painted the room in the colors of fatigue and despair. Savannah sat motionless on the edge of the chaise, hands folded like a mourner’s, staring at the manila envelope on the floor as though it might rise up and speak.It hadn’t been there when she went to bed. She would’ve seen it. Weston always knew how to enter a room without disturbing a single breath of air. A master of silent violations. That envelope—no postmark, no handwriting, just her name typed clean across its belly—lay like a severed limb. Something deliberate and surgical.She knelt slowly, the weight of her body reminding her she wasn’t alone. The child growing inside her made every movement feel like a decision. Every breath, a negotiation.Her fingers brushed the velvet string binding the flap. Even that was elegant. Expensive. She could smell the faint, familiar perfume of cigar smoke and clove oil that clung to