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The Woman in the Portrait.

Auteur: Amaya
last update Date de publication: 2026-08-16 14:45:48

Chapter 13

She died because she discovered what they were hiding.

That sentence rode home with me the whole drive back, looping over and over until it stopped sounding like words and started sounding like static. I didn't cry. I wanted to, and it wouldn't come, like my body had decided grief was a luxury I didn't have room for yet.

I went straight for the locked wing the second I got back. I didn't think about it. I didn't plan it. My legs just carried me there, past the portrait hallway, pa
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    Chapter 24 – Two Mothers, One Face Neither of them lived long enough to say it. The words sat between us in the cold, heavier than anything either of us had said all night. I didn't know what to do with a sentence like that, so I just stood there, my breath fogging in front of my face, watching Caius watch something I couldn't see. "There's something I need to show you." He said it like it had taken him this long to work up to it. "I've never shown it to anyone. Not even my father knows I kept it." "Kept what?" He didn't answer right away. He reached into the inside pocket of his coat, careful, the way you'd handle something that might fall apart if you weren't gentle enough, and pulled out a photograph small enough to hide in one closed hand. "This was my mother's." His thumb brushed the edge of it before he handed it over. "I found it after she died. I've carried it since I was a boy. I never understood what it meant until tonight." I took it with hands that weren't quite ste

  • The Wife They Wanted Dead    What Cauis Carries

    Chapter 23 "Who," I said, before the word had even finished leaving his mouth. "Dad, who gave that order?" He shook his head, jaw locked, eyes wet and refusing to spill over. "I can't." "You just told me everything else. You don't get to stop now—" "Time's up." The guard was already moving toward the table, right on cue, like the universe had decided my father got exactly one truth per visit and not a syllable more. The scrape of his chair against the floor sounded obscenely loud in a room that had gone completely silent otherwise. "No — please, just thirty more seconds, that's all I'm asking—" "Seraphine." My father's voice cracked clean through the middle, and for one terrible second I thought he might actually say it, right there, with the guard's hand already closing around his shoulder. Instead he just held my eyes, desperate, apologetic, useless. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry." They took him before I could get another word out. I don't remember walking out of that building. I

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    Chapter 22 Someone in her own contacts. I stood there staring at Sophia's face going through every stage of realizing that at once — confusion, then something closer to nausea — and I understood, with a cold, sinking certainty, that we weren't going to solve that tonight. Not standing in a room that still smelled like whoever had held me here. Not with a prison visit already burning a hole through everything else I could think about. "I need to go," I said. "Now. Before I lose my nerve." Caius didn't argue this time. He just fell into step beside me, close enough that his hand found the small of my back the second we hit the stairs, like some part of him needed the contact more than I did. The visitation room hadn't changed. Same bolted-down table, same fluorescent hum, same guard standing near the door like he'd been carved out of the same gray concrete as everything else in that building. It felt wrong that a room could stay exactly the same while everything happening around it

  • The Wife They Wanted Dead    Bring Her Back

    Chapter 21 The marriage was never meant to save her father. It was meant to bring her back to us. I read it twice before the words actually landed. Caius read it over my shoulder, close enough that I felt him go rigid beside me, his breath catching somewhere behind me like he'd been hit. The room still smelled like dust and old wiring, and somewhere underneath that, faintly, my mother's voice was still echoing in my head from the recording we'd just heard, like it hadn't finished with me yet. "Bring her back." My own voice sounded far away to me. "Back to who." Nobody answered. Sophia was still holding the phone like it had turned into something dangerous in her hand, and the man from the folder — I still didn't have a name for him — had gone quiet near the door, watching all of us with the same unreadable stillness he'd had since I first woke up in that chair. The phone buzzed again. Sophia flinched so hard she nearly dropped it. "Another one," she said, voice thin, and turne

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