Semua Bab The House of the Damned: Sin & Deceit (A Dark Romance): Bab 101 - Bab 110

Georgia's POVHe came in while I was in the drawing room.I had the book in my lap again, the one I had not read, open to a page I had not absorbed, the prop I was maintaining while I waited for the fog to thin enough to let me think in sequence."Georgia." His voice, the velvet register, cutting through the haze. He stood in the doorway with his arms crossed and his expression doing the thing it did when he was assessing me, the quick efficient inventory of a man checking his holdings.I looked up."How are you feeling today?" he asked."I don't know," I said. "Fine." The word as hollow as it always was when I used it in this house, in this life, in every managed response I had produced since a cathedral and words that tasted of ash. "I'm fine."He moved into the room. His cologne reached me before he did, sandalwood and the bitter note underneath that I had stopped being able to separate from the specific feeling of dread."You've been taking the medication?" he asked."Yes," I said

Georgia's POVI was at the doorway when Elena spoke again."He is not who you think he is."I turned back.She was standing with her hands at her sides now, the composure she had been maintaining since I walked into the kitchen that morning fully gone, the professional surface absent in a way I had not seen from her before. She looked like what she was. A woman who had been carrying something for a very long time and had just put most of it down and was standing in the aftermath of that, uncertain what came next."You said four women," I said. "Tell me about them."She looked at the window. The rain had started, soft and persistent against the glass, the Lancashire weather doing what it did, arriving without announcement."The first one was before my time here," she said. "I only know of her from things I found. Documents in the locked room. Photographs." She paused. "Her name was Catherine. She came to Brocandale as I imagine you came. She was young. She stayed for almost two years."

Georgia's POVThe night before Thursday I did not sleep.I lay in the east wing bedroom with the dark outside the window and Carlisle somewhere in the other wing and the manor breathing its ancient breath around me and I ran through the plan one final time.Nine o'clock. Elena in the east wing, door closed. I go through the kitchen, which she will not be in, which will be empty. Out the side door that opens onto the herb garden, which is not visible from the study windows. Through the herb garden to the gap in the north hedge. Through the hedge. Over the estate wall at the low point. Northeast across the moorland toward the village.Three miles.Post office.Telephone.I had a number to call. Not Michael's, which was no longer in service. Not Miranda's, which was also gone. But a number I had memorized years ago, before any of this, from the card Michael had given me at the wedding reception and which I had read so many times before the phone was taken that the digits had become part

Georgia's POVHe came into the drawing room and I was in the chair by the window with the book in my lap and I did not look up immediately, let him register me as already present and settled, the picture of medicated stillness."Good morning," he said."Good morning," I said, and turned a page I had not read.He moved through the room. Not to the chair across from me, not to the desk, but slowly, the specific movement of a man conducting a survey, touching a surface here, adjusting a small object there, each movement casual and each movement a test.I kept my eyes on the page.He sat eventually, in the chair across from me, and I felt the quality of his attention settle on my face with the focused precision I had been learning to read since the gallery and which I now read as clearly as weather.He was watching for the crack.I turned another page."How did you sleep?" he asked."Well," I said. "The medication helps."A pause. "You seem more alert than yesterday.""I feel a little bet

EVENING SILENCE PRESSED against me like a physical weight, dense as mercury, as I returned to my room. My fingers were numb unbuttoning my coat, releasing hints of lavender and something medicinal—the scent of my supposed healing, chemical gardens growing in my blood. Nights were hardest—when everything slowed, leaving me alone with my thoughts and the suffocating stillness of the manor where shadows had teeth.I barely noticed the journal at first, tucked beneath papers on the desk. I didn’t recall leaving it there, nor writing in it recently. But as my fingers touched the leather cover, something stirred within me like disturbed ashes. I had been journaling for weeks, hadn’t I? Recording fragments of days, creeping fears, unspoken questions.Another thing you don’t remember. Add it to the fucking list. Watch it grow like cancer.I opened it, the spine cracking in the silence like a gunshot echoing through empty corridors. The handwriting was mine—or looked like mine, letters curved