The Promise He Broke

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The Promise He Broke

ADRIAN

The moment Elena ran from the house, I knew I had made a mistake. Not because she had discovered the truth, but because she had discovered the wrong part of it. There were things I could explain, things I could deny, and things I could bury beneath the weight of another lie until she no longer knew which version of me deserved her hatred. But the photograph in the garden shed was not one of those things. If she found it, everything would begin again. And this time, I wasn’t certain I could stop it.

I stood in the corridor, staring at the bloodstained marble beneath the staircase. The stain had reappeared despite the fact that I had scrubbed it clean only three nights earlier. I had used bleach, then alcohol, then my own hands when neither worked. Still, every morning, the blood returned. It was never much. Just enough to remind me that the house remembered what I wanted to forget.

I crouched and touched the dark stain with my fingertips. It was warm. I pulled my hand away. “No,” I whispered.

From somewhere above me came the sound of a door closing. I looked up. The portrait at the end of the corridor had changed. It was an old painting of Elena’s first birthday in the house, commissioned by a man who had insisted that the past should be preserved in oil and gold. I had always hated it. The woman in the painting looked too much like someone I had lost. Tonight, however, it was not the woman’s face that frightened me. It was the empty space beside her.

Someone had been painted out.

I knew because I had seen the original. There had been three people in that portrait: Elena, me, and the man who was supposed to be dead.

I rose slowly. A cold sensation crept up my spine. “No,” I repeated, louder this time.

The lights flickered.

And from the portrait came a sound I had not heard in twenty years.

A quiet, familiar laugh.

I turned away and walked toward the front door. I had to find Elena before she opened anything she could not close again.

The rain had stopped, but the garden was soaked. I crossed the lawn without a coat, my shoes sinking into the mud. The path to the old shed was barely visible beneath the overgrown hedges, and the closer I came, the stronger the smell of roses became.

I hated roses.

They had been her favorite flowers. The first Elena’s. She used to fill every room with them, even when I begged her not to. She said their scent reminded her that beautiful things could survive in ugly places.

I had believed her once.

Then I learned what she had done.

The shed door was closed. A narrow strip of light escaped beneath it. I stopped several feet away, staring at the handle. Something was wrong. I could feel it in the air, in the silence, in the way the shadows seemed to gather around the building as though they were waiting for me.

“Elena?” I called.

No answer.

I reached for the handle, but before my fingers touched the metal, a voice spoke from inside.

“You’re too late, Adrian.”

I froze.

It was Elena’s voice.

Not the woman I had married. Not the woman I had buried. The other one.

The one who had been waiting for me in the mirror.

I stepped back. “What have you done?”

The voice laughed softly. “What you should have done twenty years ago.”

My hand tightened around the handle. “Open the door.”

“Why? So you can bury another secret?”

I closed my eyes. For a moment, I was no longer standing in the garden. I was back in that room, watching the blood spread across the white floor while Elena begged me to tell her the truth. I could still hear the sound of her breathing, the desperate little gasps she made as she reached for me.

I had promised her I would save her.

I had promised her I would never let her die.

And then I had broken both promises.

“Please,” I whispered.

The silence that followed was worse than any accusation.

When the voice returned, it was quieter. Almost gentle.

“You should have let me stay dead.”

A loud bang erupted from inside the shed. I lunged forward and pulled the handle, but the door refused to move. I struck it with my shoulder once, twice, then a third time. The wood shuddered but held firm.

“Elena!”

Something knocked from beneath the floor.

Three slow, deliberate knocks.

I stopped moving.

The sound was familiar. I had heard it before, on the night the house took everything from me.

I backed away from the door, my pulse hammering in my throat. No. It couldn’t be. The man beneath the house had been dead for twenty years. I had watched them lower his coffin into the ground. I had stood beside the grave until the earth covered every inch of it.

I had even signed the death certificate.

But then the knocking came again.

And a man’s voice rose from beneath the shed.

“Adrian, my boy.”

I staggered backward.

The voice was older, rougher, but unmistakable.

“Did you really think you could keep her from me forever?”

I stared at the ground beneath my feet.

For the first time in twenty years, I understood why the house had never stopped bleeding.

The dead man had never been buried.

He had been hidden.

And Elena was about to find him.