The morning after the masquerade felt like a world suspended in breath.
Outside the villa, clouds gathered in low, heavy silence, as if the sky itself was holding back a storm it didn't know how to release. Serena stood at the window, a robe wrapped tightly around her frame, her thoughts darker than the rain clouds forming above the Italian hillside.
Damon watched her from the corner of the room.
He could tell she hadn't slept—not really. Her posture was too still, too braced. As if waiting for something to hit. And maybe she was.
Maybe they both were.
"You haven't touched your tea," he said gently.
"I can't stop thinking about it," she replied without turning. "That night. The silence. The vanishing. I was only a girl… but I knew something was wrong."
He crossed the room and stopped behind her, placing a warm hand on her shoulder.
"They made you forget," he said. "That's what the Circle does. They don't kill people. They erase them."
Serena's breath shuddered.
"I remember screaming," she said. "In the dark. I remember my mother crying so quietly in the bath, like she didn't want the water to hear her. But I don't remember the funeral. I don't remember the body."
"Because there wasn't one."
She turned to face him now. "Lucien's message wasn't just a warning—it was an invitation. He wants me to chase it."
"And you want to follow."
Serena nodded. "I have to. I need to know where they put him. I need to see the truth with my own eyes. Because until I do… I don't think I'll ever be free."
Damon stepped closer, brushing a thumb across her jaw, anchoring her.
"Then we'll go together."
She blinked. "You'd really do that?"
His eyes held something both fierce and impossibly gentle. "For you, Serena… I'd dig up every grave they buried in lies."
---
They left within the hour.
Damon made the call to his private pilot. No names. No trail. Just coordinates. Just silence.
The car ride to the airstrip was quiet save for the low hum of tires against wet roads. Serena stared out the window, but her reflection in the glass looked like a ghost—a girl too old for innocence, too young for the kind of grief she'd carried most of her life.
Damon reached over, lacing their fingers together without words.
And she clung.
---
The plane cut through clouds like a scalpel, heading toward northern England—toward a place Serena had almost convinced herself was a dream: Blackmere Hollow.
The estate where her father had supposedly died.
Where the Circle had gathered one last time before it all… disappeared.
The town itself was barely on maps anymore. Forgotten. Bought up in pieces and swallowed by silence. But Damon had contacts. And he had records that never made it to the official archives.
When they landed, the sky was already bruising with twilight.
"Are you ready?" Damon asked, his voice low as they stood at the rusted gates of the abandoned manor.
Serena's hand tightened around the iron bars.
"No," she said. "But I'm going anyway."
---
The inside of the estate was a shell.
Dust hung like breath that never left the lungs. Furniture stood covered in sheets, as if the house was mourning its own memories. Every floorboard creaked like it remembered the weight of bodies that had once passed through.
Damon lit the old chandelier with a portable torch, illuminating the grand staircase—the same one Serena had dreamed about for years. The one from that night.
She touched the banister, her hand shaking.
"I remember this," she whispered. "I was standing right there… when I heard the gunshot."
Damon froze.
"You never said it was a gunshot."
"Because no one else ever acknowledged it. They told me it was thunder. Just thunder."
She looked at him, eyes wide.
"But it wasn't raining that night."
---
They found the hidden room after two hours of searching.
A concealed panel behind the old library.
Inside: a single chair, a long-forgotten coat, and a wall stained faintly red.
Serena stepped in first.
And the weight of the air changed.
Like the room still remembered the scream that had once been smothered here.
She walked to the wall, brushing fingers along the faded stain. "This is where it happened."
Damon looked at the floor.
"It's concrete. No trap doors. No secret passages. If a body was here… they didn't bury it in this room."
Serena turned slowly. Her voice came out distant. Hollow.
"Then they took him."
She dropped to her knees, breath catching, shoulders beginning to shake. Damon knelt beside her, wrapping her in his arms.
"I thought if I found this place, the ache would go away," she said. "But it's worse now. It's so much worse."
"It's not the end," he murmured. "It's the beginning. They took something from you, Serena. Now we take something back."
She buried her face in his chest, letting herself cry for the first time in years.
Not because she was weak.
But because she had finally found a place safe enough to be broken in.
---
Outside, the wind moved through the hollow trees like a voice just out of reach.
And somewhere deeper in the woods, unseen eyes watched from the shadows.
The past was awake.
And it was waiting.