Page 18 of Porcelain Grave

I nod to them, a silent promise. "You will all be avenged," I mutter, my voice sounding foreign and lethal.

I turn away from the bodies and scan the room until I spot it: a heavy sledgehammer leaning against the wall. I grab the handle, the weight of it feeling right in my grip. Rhys follows me, his presence a dark shadow at my back, as we head downstairs, leaving the dead to their silence.

We end up on the first floor, in the Tin Heart toy shop. I walk through the aisles of porcelain dolls and clockwork toys, my mind racing.

"What are you looking for, love?" Rhys asks, his voice low and curious.

"The door to the basement," I snap.

I lead him to the back, into that room I was always told belonged to my mother. The room where I found the Victorian gothic dresses—the ones that made me feel like a queen in a graveyard. I stop and turn to him, my brow furrowed.

"There's one thing I don't fucking get," I say, gesturing to the clothes. "My dad told us these dresses came with her when she ran away to marry him. But she was kidnapped, Rhys. She didn't pack her finest Victorian gowns for a kidnapping. And my dad? He's too fucking broke to afford things like this. These look like they were made for another century. Where did they actually come from?"

Rhys steps closer, his eyes dark. "After your mother died, Thomas broke into her room at Hansburg Manor. He stole everything that reminded him of her. Every scrap of fabric, every piece of lace."

I blink, stunned.

"He stole these dresses from her closet," Rhys explains, his voice cold. "They were expensive, Victorian. He brought them here to create a fucking illusion. He wanted everyone to believe Marguerite had come back and taken her things—that she'd left her home voluntarily and was never kidnapped. To the world, it looked like she just packed up and vanished. In reality... Thomas stripped her life bare himself."

The realization hits me like a punch to the throat as Rhys tells me more. Everything. The dresses, the gloves, the shoes, the jewelry, the classic novels. Even the perfume he stayed with applying it on himself to feel as though he was with her until it ran out and was too expensive to buy—they all belonged to her. My father had sold the jewelry and gloves for quick cash, but he kept the rest, hoarding her essence like a fucking scavenger.

"The Hansburgs saw through it," Rhys adds. "They knew their daughter wouldn't have come back just to steal her own clothes."

I can't even find the words. I feel sick, the betrayal layering over the grief. I start feeling the walls of the room, my fingers searching for a hollow spot, a seam, anything.

"We have to do this now," I say, my voice urgent. "It's almost sunset, and there aren't any fucking lights in this house. We're running out of time."

Suddenly, my hand hits something. A void in the wood. A hidden space.

I raise the sledgehammer high, my muscles tensing, ready to smash the wall into splinters. But before I can swing, Rhys's hand clamps around my wrist, stopping me.

"Let me," he says, his voice a commanding growl.

He reaches into his pocket and hands me his phone for light, then slips off his jacket and drapes it over my shoulders, shielding me from the chill. He rolls up his sleeves, exposing his forearms, and takes the sledgehammer from my grip.

He doesn't hesitate. With a guttural shout, he swings the hammer back and slams it into the wall. The sound of crashing plaster and splintering wood echoes through the house, a violent symphony of destruction. He hits it again and again, tearing through the lies of my father, ripping open the wall to reveal whatever hell lies beneath.

Rhys doesn't stop. He keeps swinging that fucking sledgehammer with a rhythmic, violent intensity that makes my chest tighten. I can’t take my eyes off him—the way his shoulders bunch, the raw strength in his arms, the muscles in his forearms flexing and straining under his skin with every guttural grunt. He’s like some dark god of destruction, ripping through the lies my father built.

It doesn't take long. With one final, bone-jarring crash, the wall gives way, showering us in a cloud of grey dust and splinters.

And there it is.

A door. It’s a heavy, oppressive thing made of dark, rotting oak, looking like it belongs in a fucking dungeon rather than a house. It’s small, cramped, and bolted shut with a rusted iron lock that looks like it hasn't seen a key in decades.

Rhys doesn't even pause to look for a key. He raises the hammer and brings it down on the center of the wood. CRACK. The sound is deafening in the small room. Another hit, and the wood splinters like cardboard. He kicks the remains of the door aside, revealing a gaping black maw.

Stairs. Stone stairs, steep and narrow, descending into a darkness so thick it feels like it could swallow us whole.

Rhys sets the hammer down with a heavy thud. I step forward, my heart hammering against my ribs, and click on the flashlight from his phone. The beam of light cuts through the gloom, revealing air that is stagnant, freezing, and smelling of ancient damp and something metallic—something that makes the back of my throat itch.

As I descend, the cold clings to my skin like a wet shroud. When my boots finally hit the basement floor, the light sweeps across the room, and I nearly lose my fucking mind.

It’s a tomb. A living, breathing nightmare.

The walls are weeping, slick with moisture, but it’s the floor that stops my breath. There are stains. Dark, brownish-red smears and splatters that have soaked into the concrete for nineteen fucking years. Blood. Her blood.

The light lands on a mattress in the corner, stripped of any dignity. The sheets are yellowed with age but stained with massive, horrific blooms of dried blood—the remnants of a birth, or a murder, or both. Nearby, a cracked ceramic plate sits on the floor, a few crusts of something unidentifiable still clinging to it, and a glass of water that has long since evaporated, leaving behind a ring of grime. This is where he kept her. This is where she suffered.