Chapter 22
TWENTY-TWO
They planned to kill Castle.
Have I heard them correctly? But why would they want their brother dead?
There was something missing here.
I stayed hidden inside the closet while Dayana checked the room. I could see her shiny green pumps from a small opening. I heard the shuffling as she moved around in the room.
I didn’t move an inch. My breathing had turned heavy. I pressed my hand to my mouth.
I married into this family, and even if I was initially forced to, I’d accepted my fate because of Castle, because I loved him. But I had no intention of spending my entire life hiding from a family that was now supposed to bemy own.
Yeah, I was part of this screwed up family. It was the bitter truth.
Devin followed Dayana into the room and they spoke in hushed voices, looking around in the darkened room.
Just then, my back hit the wooden wall and something behind me moved.
Meeeoowww...
The fat Himalayan cat Lulu jumped from a top shelf and went to brush herself against Dayana’s legs.
“Aw, so it was you who was making those sounds.” Dayana picked the fluffy cat up into her arms. “Are you hungry, baby?” she cooed.
Thankfully, they decided the cat was making the ruckus and left the room, closing the door behind them.
I stayed put for a few minutes in case they were still there, listening against the door. I was trying to avoid trouble.
If Devin and Dayana wanted to plot Castle’s murder, why would they be so careless and leave the door open? There were a lot of servants in the house who would eavesdrop, and word would certainly get out.
Unless...
They were trying to bait me with it.
I pushed the inner closet paneling a little and noticed a small gap between them. When I pushed it harder, the entire thing just fell apart. There was a tunnel ahead of me, much similar to the one that I’d been to before.
This mansion had a lot of secret tunnels and passageways, so it shouldn’t have come as a surprise to me, but something about this darkened passage made little sense.
They installed the entry to it through the old closet, which honestly looked out of place in a big room.
There was old furniture littering around the place, some vintage chairs, tables carved out of expensive wood, and a four-poster bed fit for a king. Because a house staff maintained the room by dusting and cleaning it, anyone finding the room wouldn’t suspect the closet’s inner paneling concealed a secret passage. It was meant to look like any other old furniture. The secret rooms or passages hid in plain sight.
I stepped from the closet and onto the narrow dingy passage that was pitch black. With shaky hands, I pulled out my phone and used its flashlight to navigate my way through it.
An unsettling feeling crept into my skin. I knew I was making the same huge mistake I’d done before by walking right into dangerous territory. If I was any smarter, I should have turned and walked back like I hadn’t noticed this, but I couldn’t.
Maybe it was the curiosity burning like a flame inside me. I wanted to play Sherlock Holmes. Or maybe it was the thrill to dig deeper into the family’s dirty secrets.
The passage turned narrower and narrower, dirt matted the floor. The walls that once had some nice wallpaper were now yellow and peeling. You wouldn’t even guess this place was inside the mansion. It was so dank and dirty.
At the end of the way, there was a steep set of stairs. I almost lost my footing. I wondered if one of the Mad Montgomery ancestors who had this built wanted unsuspecting people to run down this passage and fall down these stairs, possibly breaking their necks and end up dead.
When I took the stairs down, it hit a strange dead end. The stairs just ended with a wall, nothing after that. The Montgomerys were sick, but they were also trolls.
I climbed back up and started making my way towards the entrance. I needed to get back to Castle before he noticed me gone. He usually wrecked havoc if he didn’t find me.
I almost passed through when in my peripheral vision; I saw a tiny hole in the wall. I wouldn’t have noticed it in the dark if I hadn’t been so vigilant.
I peeped through it.
There were four people in the room, seated on a wooden chair—all of them staring in four different directions, facing the inner circle. I poked the hole in the wall, and the cement began falling off. That’s all I needed to get a clearer image.
The people were bound, and the chairs were positioned at the center of a large red pentagram. Similar symbols were painted on the walls, each one corresponding to the person seated in front of it.
They weren’t even people.
These were dead, decaying bodies, preserved like they were still alive.
A symbol marked each of their foreheads. I didn’t recognize the other bodies, but I knew one of them—Ollie the stable boy that Castle had killed and I’d helped him to bury.
Someone knew what we’d done and had dug up the body from the ground. The body that had a missing head because Castle had smashed it. They stitched a goat’s head onto the body in place of Ollie’s head.
I fought back the urge to hurl up my breakfast. I felt sick to the pit of my stomach, but I continued to watch. Tiny candles were lit in each of the circles.
I needed to leave right now!
I backed away from the wall and sneaked back into the wardrobe. Still shaking, I placed the wooden paneling back, and it clicked right into place.
I couldn’t concentrate on anything for the entire day. I kept seeing that horrible imagery of the four dead bodies in a circle, staring blankly ahead.
My appetite was completely lost by dinner time. I couldn’t eat the lamb chops without thinking of the goat’s head stitched onto Ollie’s head. Devin eyed me curiously, but didn’t say a word.
It was hard to read his expressions as he’d mastered the art of keeping his expressions poker face. If he knew I’d listened to their conversation, he didn’t let it show. Same with Dayana.
They spoke softly about business. Chandler was busy shoveling the food down his throat like he was an escaped prisoner who’d just discovered quality food. Theo, as usual, looked bored and texted under the table.
“What do you think, Millie?” Devin asked me.
“Sorry, I didn’t hear what you said.”
“I asked if you would be interested in showing up at the next company board meeting? We’re launching our new skincare brand.”
“What would I do at a board meeting?”
Dayana laughed, “You’re the oldest son’s wife, Millie. You’re a Montgomery now. Since Castle wouldn’t be able to take part in the meetings, you can have his seat. If we think you’re capable, we’ll even consider handing over the brand to you. That’s what Castle would have wanted from his wife.”
“It’s an excellent opportunity for you to learn the operations of the company.”
This was a little too much for me to process.
They wanted me to join the company board meeting?
“That’s a lot of responsibility, but it sounds great.”
It sounded too good to be true.
But looking at the two of them, I didn’t think they were giving me a choice to refuse their offer. They wanted me on board.
No one in this family was perfect. Devin liked to drown himself in bottles of liquor and brought countless women home. Dayana was as perfect as she appeared to the public eye, only she wasn’t. She sneaked in buffed up male escorts into her room, sometimes three at one time, and I’m sure it was a nice big perverted party. I was no one to judge. The siblings had peculiar tastes.
The other day, I’d seen one of the other stable boys—Alan, the nice looking one with a southern drawl who was also sweet and respectful, unlike Ollie.
Anyway, one time after midnight, I’d run out of water bottles from the mini-refrigerator so I’d gone downstairs to the kitchen myself.
And regretted it terribly.
There was Dayana and Alan enjoying themselves fucking each other to oblivion.
Dayana could fuck the stable boys, the gardeners, or anyone else for all I cared. I know Theo had walked in after me with AirPods blaring music, picked up a bottle of chilled soda, and walked out like what was happening in the pantry was just normal.
Before going to bed, I went to Theo’s room. He was the only person in this house that I trusted apart from Castle. And we’d become great friends despite the eight years age difference.
I knocked on his door. “Theo, it’s me, Millie.”
“Come inside, Millie.”
I entered the room.
I rarely visited Theo’s bedroom. It was a typical room for a teen boy. He had a floor to ceiling display of action figures, a black guitar was in the corner, posters of heavy metal bands on the wall, and the furniture was dark wood, carved and custom made.
“You can’t tell this to anybody,” I said.
He closed his book and turned to look at me, “What can’t I tell anybody?”
“What I’m about to tell you.”
He nodded. “Your secret is safe with me.”
I paced around the room.
His brown eyes twinkled as he grinned. “Okay, you need to calm down first and tell me what happened.”
I explained to him about what I’d heard Devin saying, that he’d planned to kill Castle, followed by the discovery of the secret passage and the bodies on the pentagram. I left out the part where I realized one body belonged to Ollie because then I would have to explain how Castle had accidentally killed him.
Theo stared at me and then burst out laughing. “That’s a nice joke.”
“I’m not joking. I wouldn’t have come to your room right now if I was not serious.”
“First off, Devin is probably just screwing with you. He wouldn’t kill Castle. Second, there’s no way they would keep the bodies in the house. Accidents on the property are well taken care of. The Montgomery’s excel in cover-ups. Our family has the detectives and the police department under their thumbs.”
He said our family and included me in it.
I hated that I was part of this screwed up family that called murders accidents.
“Devin or Dayana are doing these crazy rituals! I know it!”
Theo shook his head, “That’s not possible. Stop saying that shit!”
“So, how do you explain it? Are you saying that I’m making this all up?”
He ran his hand through his hair, staring into the distance, and then the realization hit him as he froze. There was unadulterated fear clear in his eyes.
“Grandpa.” He whispered.
“What about him?”
“He was the one who used to practise the rituals until he lost his memories. Castle doesn’t remember shit either, Chandler is too young for all of this unless...” he swallowed.
“Unless?”
I knew I would not like the answer to it.
“Unless Grandpa has chosen Devin to carry out what he started. I don’t know what’s going on, but the body count won’t stop at four.” He tapped his fingers on the desk, and he was visibly shaking. “We will end up dying, Millie. Each one of us.”
“How do we stop him?”
Theo stared straight into my eyes. “We can’t. Only Castle can stop him, but for that, we need to wake him up first.”