Read Chapter 10: The Locked Room

The east wing had always been a shadow in the corner of my vision, a corridor I’d walked past a dozen times without ever registering its door. But now, with Merrick’s lantern swinging ahead of me, it felt less like architecture and more like a held breath.

“It’s not a room of any importance,” he said, not looking back. His voice was flat, careful. The kind of voice a man uses when he’s deciding what not to say.

I followed him past the peeling wallpaper and the portraits whose eyes I’d grown used to avoiding. The house groaned around us, the storm throwing its weight against the stone, and somewhere below, the sea chewed at the cliff like it had a grudge.

“You said the house has secrets,” I said. “You didn’t say they were organized by wing.”

Merrick stopped at the end of the corridor. The lantern light pooled around a door that was older than the others, its wood dark and warped, the iron hinges crusted with rust. A brass keyhole glinted, polished despite everything else’s decay.

He stood before it, and I watched him not reach for the handle.

“This is private,” he said.

“Everything in this house is private until I find it.” I stepped closer. The ring on my finger pulsed—a low, insistent warmth that I was beginning to trust more than my own instincts. “Who is this room for?”

Merrick’s jaw tightened. He was younger than I’d first thought—or older, it was hard to tell in this light. There was a weariness to him that had nothing to do with age, a look of carrying something too heavy for too long.

“It’s not for anyone,” he said. “It’s simply closed.”

“Then why did you bring me here?”

He didn’t answer. Instead, he turned, and for a moment I saw something crack in his face—not anger, not fear. Something closer to grief, and grief he was furious at himself for showing.

“The storm is getting worse,” he said. “The bridge will be out by morning. You should rest.”

He turned to leave, but I caught his sleeve. “You told me the storm wouldn’t keep us alone. Who’s coming, Merrick?”

He looked down at my hand on his arm, then up at me. “Someone who should have stayed buried.”

The words hung between us, and the ring burned so hot I snatched my hand back, gasping. Merrick’s eyes snapped to my finger, and in the lantern light I saw him pale.

“You’re wearing it,” he said.

“You know I am.”

“It’s grown—” He stopped himself. Whatever he’d been about to say, he swallowed it whole. “Don’t follow me. Go back to your room.”

He was gone before I could argue, his footsteps swallowed by the roar of the storm, and I was left alone in the corridor with the locked door and a ring that had begun to cool the moment he left.

I should have listened. I should have gone back to my room and poured myself a glass of whatever whiskey I’d found in the cabinet, and pretended the night hadn’t happened.

Instead, I pressed my eye to the keyhole.

The room beyond was dark, but not completely. A pale light filtered through a window—moonlight, distorted by the storm’s fury, casting silver shapes across the floor. I could make out a bed, its covers turned down with care. A dressing table laden with brushes and pots. A wardrobe against the far wall, its doors slightly ajar.

And through the gap, a swath of fabric. Blue. The color of a summer sky before it burns away to haze.

The color Lillian was wearing the last time I saw her.

I don’t remember making the decision to try the door. I only remember the feel of the handle under my palm, cold and unmoving, and the stupid, useless rattling of a lock that had no intention of giving way.

“Lillian?” My voice came out ragged, barely a whisper. I pressed my forehead against the wood. “Lil, if you’re in there, I’m here. I’m here.”

The storm answered me. The house answered me. The ring on my finger went cold as stone.

I pulled back and looked through the keyhole again. The wardrobe doors had moved. I was certain of it—the gap had widened, the blue fabric slipping further into the light, as if someone inside was drawing it closer.

Or as if it had been waiting for me to notice.

I stumbled backward, my heel catching on the floorboards. I kept my eyes on the door, half expecting it to swing open, half terrified it would.

It didn’t.

But when I turned, Merrick was standing at the end of the corridor, watching me with an expression I couldn’t read.

“I told you not to follow,” he said.

“There’s a woman’s dress in there,” I said. My voice shook, and I hated that it did. “Blue. It’s the same color Lillian wore the day she vanished. You said this room was private. You didn’t say it was hers.”

Merrick didn’t deny it. He didn’t confirm it. He just stood there, rain streaming from his coat, his lantern dripping water onto the floorboards, and said, “No one has opened that wardrobe in thirty years.”

“Then who moved the fabric?”

The silence stretched between us, filled only by the storm and the sea and the sound of my own heart, which seemed determined to beat its way out of my chest.

Merrick took a step toward me. Then another. He stopped just out of reach, and I saw his hands trembling at his sides.

“Elowen,” he said, and it was the first time he’d used my name. It landed like a stone in still water. “You need to understand something. The house doesn’t lie. But it doesn’t tell the truth the way you expect it to.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the only one I have.”

I looked past him toward the room I was supposed to sleep in, the room where anonymous letters had appeared and vanished, where the ghost of my sister’s handwriting had crawled across the page. Then I looked back at the locked door.

“Then I’ll find my own answers,” I said. “I’ll tear this house apart brick by brick if I have to.”

Merrick’s face did something complicated. Fear, anger, and beneath it, something dangerously close to hope.

“You can’t tear it apart,” he said. “It’s already been waiting for you to arrive.”

The ring on my finger pulsed, hot and cold in the same heartbeat, like a warning and a beckoning all at once.

“Merrick,” I said, “what is this house?”

He opened his mouth to answer, and somewhere beneath us, the manor let out a groan so deep it seemed to come from the bedrock itself. The floor shuddered. The lantern in Merrick’s hand guttered, and the corridor plunged into darkness.

When the light returned—a thin, flickering flame—he was closer to me than he’d been a moment before. Close enough that I could smell the salt on his coat, the rain in his hair.

“It’s the house that buried your sister,” he said. “And it’s the only thing that can bring her back.”