There is a kind of house that does not sleep. It breathes in silence, sweats rot through its wallpaper, and cracks its bones beneath your feet. It doesn't want to be sold. It doesn't want to be saved. It wants to be remembered. And when the wrong soul enters it… it wakes.
Ayla stood before such a house on a windless night. The Greybourne Estate loomed before her like a wound sunken into the earth, three stories tall, bricked-up windows like blind eyes, a rusted iron gate that only opened for blood. Its last known residents had vanished, one by one, over three decades. Some said it was cursed. Others said something inside it fed. Damian had asked her not to go. He said this house was different—his men wouldn't enter, the paperwork bled through when touched, even the ownership documents refused ink unless mixed with blood. But Ayla had already heard the house call to her. In dreams. In whispers. In screams that stopped just before the end. So she said yes.
Inside, the house was colder than the night, not dusty, but hollow—as if emptied of time, of memory, of anything human. She moved slowly, a spiral drawn in chalk tucked into her coat, a rusted silver nail on a red thread around her neck. It still smelled faintly of her great-grandfather, the spirit-guardian who had once saved her mother from something like this. She spoke into the silence: "I don't want to fight you." A light flickered somewhere above. Then footsteps—wet, heavy, wrong.
She followed them to the second floor. There, in the shadow-drenched ballroom, she found a chandelier swaying without wind. The walls were lined with mirrors, but none reflected her. Then the house began to shift—the air bent sideways, the floor stretched, the doors sealed shut, and from the shadows, they came. Crawling. Broken. The family. The Greybournes. Their mouths sewn shut, their hands blackened, their eyes glowing with something that wasn't theirs anymore.
Ayla backed against the wall. "No," she whispered. "You don't belong like this." The silence screamed. And then the house lunged. She doesn't remember it all. Only flashes—cold fire, pressure behind her eyes, something looking through her instead of at her. A weight on her chest that tasted like rust and memory. And then, a voice. Not a ghost. Not a man. Something more.
"You have power," it said, deep and calm, "but you do not own it." Her voice trembled. "Who are you?" The answer came slow: "I am what you become when you stop pretending to be small." For a single moment, Ayla saw herself—older, cloaked in black and gold, crowned in shadow, standing between the living and the dead as if she were both. Then—nothing.
She woke outside, face in the grass, arms scraped, nose bleeding. A spiral had been burned into the earth around her. The house behind her had gone silent. Empty. Dead. She had survived. But not alone. Damian found her slumped outside the estate wall, dazed and barely conscious. And there, on her palm, he saw it: a mark, burned into her skin. A spiral inside a circle, ringed with runes older than written language. It was the same symbol found in spirit tablets of the underworld clans—the same one her great-grandfather wore when he vanished into fire to save Ayla's mother. This was no simple ward. It was a claim. Something had marked her. Something old. Something watching. Something waiting.
Weeks passed. But Ayla didn't rest. She trained harder, learned forbidden rites from mirror-reading monks, studied fate in cracked bone and broken glass. She searched ruins no one remembered, opened books that smelled like ash and dust. She even built a hidden chamber beneath one of her towers—walled in iron and sealed with salt, locked with no key but her own breath.
The world had opened a door, and Ayla had no intention of closing it.
Far across the city, in a tower of mirrored glass and quiet wealth, another figure watched. He wore black stitched in silence, a wolf-shaped cufflink glinting at his wrist. His name carried weight in boardrooms and courtrooms. He had conquered cities with contracts, gutted neighborhoods with law. And now, he watched her. From behind tinted glass, he studied the girl who moved through ghosts. The girl who touched darkness and didn't flinch. She had crossed his path more than once, and each time, he let her go. Not out of mercy—but curiosity.
He smiled to himself—just a flicker of teeth—and whispered to the empty room, "Interesting."
End of Chapter 4