29. Keira
KEIRA
My phone dings.
I flinch so hard that tea sloshes over the rim. Wiping my fingers on my pajama pants, I glance down.
It’s an unknown number. My pulse lightens, ready to dismiss another spam text?—
Unknown Number: Some secrets should stay buried, K.
You don’t want to dig up ghosts you loved.
A second bubble appears before I can process the first:
Remember the rosebush by the pond?
I do.
The mug slips from my grasp, hits the Persian runner with a dull thud, lukewarm tea soaking into crimson threads. My limbs go jelly-weak.
Only two people ever saw Riley tuck that rose behind her ear. Riley and me—and whoever waited in the dark for her to leave that night.
Spam can’t know that.
A third message pings:
Your father kept… his secrets.
Don’t make me clean up his mess.
My lungs seize. I taste metal. There’s no name, no threat spelled outright, but every syllable drips with knowledge no outsider could possess.
Yet the number isn’t one I know - I fumble with the phone, open my screen and hover over the number, then call.
It gives me nothing but static. I try again. And again. Without success.
“College prank,” I mutter, but the words collapse in my mouth.
The bullies back at Saint Ignatius wouldn’t know about the rosebush, wouldn’t know the secrets my father kept, wouldn’t know the pond.
They bullied me mercilessly for my father’s sins—but they never questioned the secrets buried in his history.
My shaking thumb hovers over the call button. Who can I call? Who can I confide in?
The library’s high windows suddenly feel too open, moonlight too bright. Anyone camped on the south lawn could watch me panic, count my breaths, taste my fear.
A final vibration jolts my hand.
You can’t hide in a haunted house forever.
See you soon, Keira .
My chest caves. It’s not the words. It’s the certainty in them.
They don’t ask where I am, because they already know.
I delete the message with a swipe of my thumb like that can erase the terror curling cold and slick in my stomach. But it’s too late. The chill is in my spine now, in my fingers, under my nails.
The mansion is quiet—too quiet. Ancient. Breathing.
Somewhere down the hall, an old pipe sighs. The wind scratches along the windows like it’s trying to get in. Or maybe out.
I pace. Six steps, turn. Six steps, turn.
The message replays in my mind like a whisper I can’t shake:
Some secrets should stay buried.
Some secrets should stay buried.
Some secrets…
I stop breathing.
I head to the kitchen. For water. For something.
It’s not about thirst. It’s about movement. Control.
If I stop, I’ll shatter.
The overhead lights are off. I don’t bother turning them on.
The fridge hums. The countertop gleams faintly under moonlight. But it’s the pantry I’m pulled toward—like something in there is waiting.
I crack open the door. The light inside is dim, yellow, flickering with age. It hums faintly like it might go out at any second.
Shelves line the walls, stacked with dust-coated tins, mason jars, ancient spices with names in languages I don’t speak. I reach for a tin of biscuits and pause.
I freeze. There’s a blue cardboard box tucked behind a sack of jasmine rice. The cartoon fox still grins, smug and sharp-toothed. The packaging has changed over the years, but I’d know that box anywhere.
Riley’s favorite cereal.
The cereal box is wedged behind a sack of rice, cardboard corners soft with age—but one brush of my fingertip and I’m ripped backward in time.
Midnight in Riley’s kitchen, the overhead light buzzing like a bee stuck in glass. We’re thirteen, socks sliding on vinyl, pilfering contraband before her mother wakes for the night shift. Riley flips the box onto the counter with a flourish.
“Snap-crackle-lies,” she declares, pouring a river of neon puffs straight into her palm.
“It’s basically stale sugar,” I mutter, but I’m already stealing a handful.
“That’s the point,” she says, cheeks ballooned, grin wide enough to swallow the moonlight. “Tastes like childhood and rebellion—two things grown-ups keep trying to sell back to us.”
Crunch. Sweet dust clings to the roof of my mouth, fizzes like static in the quiet. I glance at the clock: 12:03 a.m.—a time that feels lawless, ours. Riley leans against the fridge, legs crossed at the ankles, smirking like she’s cracked some cosmic code.
“Someday,” she whispers, “we’ll laugh about eating cheap sugar out of a box.”
“Or we’ll choke on it,” I shoot back, but the laughter’s already bubbling up, reckless and bright.
She nudges me with her elbow. “Exactly.”
That single word—equal parts dare and promise—echoes across the years as I stand in the mansion’s pantry, knuckles white around cardboard that shouldn’t still smell like vanilla and neon dye.
The kitchen light here is polished brass, not buzzing plastic; the night outside this window is guarded by money and power, not a half-broken porch light.
And Riley’s grin is dust, somewhere beneath unmarked soil.
But the taste—stale sugar, cheap food dye—spreads across my tongue anyway, carrying the rush of who we were before the world learned how to break us.
Exactly .
The box slips from my hand, thuds to the floor, and spills its dead constellations everywhere—tiny, bright lies scattered at my feet.
We’re thirteen. Her kitchen. Midnight. The lights are off and we’re eating cereal straight from the box, laughing into each other’s shoulders like we’re invincible.
Her freckles are stardust. Her eyes are wild.
She’s talking about running away, hitchhiking across the country with nothing but a guitar and that damn cereal box.
Then we’re fourteen. Her bedroom. I’m lying on the floor, staring at her ceiling. She’s braiding my hair. She tells me someone’s been watching her. I feel his eyes on me all the time, she says, voice shaking. I tell her I’ll walk her home on Monday.
Monday never comes.
Next memory: sirens. Police tape. Her mother’s face caving in as she screams. A body bag without a body. The news says missing. But I know better. I feel she’s gone. I say nothing.
Dad’s hand on my shoulder that night was gentle, but his grip told me: Shut up. And I did.
My knees give out.
I fall into a sack of flour. It bursts open, a soft explosion. I choke. Cough. Claw at the air.
The walls are closing in.
I can’t breathe.
My ribs feel like they’re wrapped in barbed wire. Every gasp is a wound. The cereal box stares at me like it knows what I did. Or didn’t do. Like Riley’s ghost is crouched beside me whispering, Why didn’t you come with me?
I drop to the tile, hands slick with flour, body shaking. I taste bile. I think I might’ve screamed, but I can’t hear over the blood in my ears. My heart’s not beating—it’s hammering. Wild. Terrified. Loud enough to wake the dead.
Footsteps thunder down the hall. Slow. Heavy. Precise. Like someone used to walking into warzones and surviving .
The pantry door flies open. It’s Jayson.
Backlit by moonlight, he looks unholy. Barefoot, shirtless, wearing dark fatigues, his eyes pin me to the floor like a sniper. His chest rises and falls with silent fury, but he doesn’t say anything.
He crouches. Doesn’t touch me. Just watches. Tilts his head like I’m some specimen he needs to decipher.
I’m shaking so hard I can’t speak.
My fingers scrabble through the flour, desperate to hold onto something, anything, but I’m drowning. I’m choking. I’m gone.
Then he breathes. Deep. Measured. One hand pressed to his chest.
“In,” he says. “Four seconds. Now.”
I try. I fail. My lungs are frozen, locked in place.
He shifts closer, just enough for his voice to crack the ice.
“Again. In. Four. Out. Six.”
I match him. Just barely. The breath is ragged, but it moves. I focus on his voice. His breathing. The movement of his eyes as they track me. The cadence of survival.
Slowly, my body stops fighting me.
Slowly, I come back.
He doesn’t say a word as he picks up the cereal box, turns it over once in his hand, then sets it down face-first on the shelf.
Gone. Just cardboard now.
I curl into myself, still trembling. He finally speaks.
“What did you see?”
I shake my head.
His jaw tightens. But his voice stays soft, like worn leather.
“You can’t outrun ghosts if you keep feeding them.”
I look up. And he’s just… there. A man I don’t understand, but somehow trust in my worst moments.
My voice is a breath, but nothing comes out.
He looks at the mess. My body in the flour. The red rim around my eyes. The handprint on my chest where I clawed myself trying to breathe.
He offers his hand.
And the girl who has no-one left in the world takes it.
His palm is calloused, grounding, warm. He helps me up without a word, dusts the flour from my arms, then leads me out of the pantry like we’re leaving a graveyard. Maybe we are.
As he walks me upstairs, I feel it in my bones: the monsters are not all dead. Some of them are still hunting. And some of them? They sleep in the room next to mine. But tonight… one of them held me like I was human. And for one breathless, terrifying second—I wanted to be his.