The Cole country estate sat just outside the city, a sprawling, once grand mansion that had fallen into elegant decay. Zariah hadn't been there since she was seventeen.
The gravel crunched under her boots as she walked towards the greenhouse. The air smelled like wet earth and wilted dreams. The glass panels were smudged and moss covered. The inside, everything was overgrown, ivy, dead orchids, vines choking the life out of forgotten beauty. Her mother had once loved this place. She said it was her " sanctuary."
Now it looked like a graveyard.
Zariah stepped carefully between cracked pots and rusted tools until she reached the back wall. There, behind a false panel Dorian has described, she found it:
A steel lockbox.
She knelt, entered the code he'd texted her - 0412. Her mother's birthday.
It clicked open.
Inside was a flash drive, wrapped in silk. A faded passport with her mother's picture but a different name: Celeste Bishop.
And a small, leather bound journal.
Zariah picked it up, heart pounding.
Her mother's handwriting danced across the first page:
"If I die, it won't be an accident. And if Zariah finds this, tell her I never stopped loving her, even when I couldn't protect her."
Zariah swallowed hard. The pages after that were filled with entries, code names, symbols, financial notes and something stranger; drawing of an old locket. A silver one and a blue stone.
In the margin, her mother had written:
"Dorian knows. He always knew."
Zariah closed the book, eyes burning.
She stood up, walked outside into the wind and froze.
There was someone watching her from the woods. A tall figure in a dark coat.
She took a step forward, heart racing.
The figure disappeared into the trees.
She broke into a run but when she reached the edge of the forest, it was empty, no footprints, mo sound, just the wind whispering through branches like it was keeping secrets.
Her phone buzzed. A message from an unknown number:
"Stop digging or you will be buried too."