Chapter 11
Penelope didn’t look back as they left the bloodstained corridor. Not because she was brave, but rather there was nothing behind her worth looking back at.
The house felt smaller than she remembered.
Smaller, darker, as if the walls had shrunk inward during the years she’d been gone. Or perhaps she had simply outgrown it. She didn’t belong here anymore. She wasn’t sure she ever had.
Mingxi kept close, his steps quieter than hers. His presence filled the silence her parents never had.
They reached the staircase.
She paused, not from grief, but from disorientation.
The banister was cracked, splintered where violence had forced its way through.
Nineteen years ago, she’d been forbidden to touch it for fear of “leaving prints.” Now it bore the marks of far worse hands than hers.
A bemused smile lit her face briefly, enjoying the irony.
She descended without touching it.
The foyer stank of blood and decay. A sharp, metallic tang threaded through the air, clinging to the back of her throat. She felt no sorrow for it. Only a faint, strange hollowness where other people might have felt loss.
Mingxi watched her—as if he couldn’t help watching her—but he said nothing.
She appreciated that.
They stepped over shattered glass glittering across the marble floor. A smear of darkened blood stretched toward the front door. Penelope did not flinch. She had seen worse, survived worse, and the people who once lived here had never protected her from anything.
At the threshold, cold night air brushed her face. The smell of wet leaves, smoke, and something clean, untainted by the rot inside. It struck her harder than anything in the house had. Home, she realized, was not this place. Not since Lysandra died.
Mingxi pushed the ruined door open fully, leaving her the space to choose.
Penelope stepped out first. Gravel crunched beneath her shoes, the sound grounding her more than anything inside had. She inhaled deeply, the chill burning through her lungs—shockingly sharp, shockingly real.
Mingxi’s hand hovered near her elbow, an offer rather than a touch.
“I am not fragile,” she said quietly.
“No,” he agreed. “You aren’t.”
She glanced once at the manor behind them—not in mourning, but to confirm it was still there, still a relic of someone else’s making, something she did not have to carry anymore.
Then she turned away from it and didn’t look back again.
But the night was not silent. A faint noise carried across the night—soft at first and then louder, as if something was being dragged through gravel. Penelope’s shoulders tensed, the sound threading into her nerves before she fully registered it.
Mingxi clearly heard it too. His posture shifted, subtle but sharp, his attention snapping toward the manor’s shadowed threshold.
The scrape came again.
Wet.
Uneven.
Growing closer.
The dragging sound grew louder, wet, and uneven, like bone scraping against stone. Mingxi shifted fully in front of Penelope, one tail sweeping behind him in a protective curve.
“Stay close,” he murmured.
Penelope didn’t need to be told twice, but she also didn’t cower. She stepped half a pace to the side instead—enough that she wasn’t shielded behind him, but beside him.
A noble sorcerer. Not prey.
A figure lurched into view.
What was left of the butler—Mr. Hale, Penelope realized with an icy stillness—dragged himself forward on shattered limbs. His uniform hung in tatters, his neck twisted unnaturally, jaw hanging loosely from its hinge.
But his eyes, they weren’t searching the hall. They were fixed directly on her.
Penelope raised a brow. She had hated him once, but she felt nothing for him now. Mingxi felt her magic coil in response, silver threads pulling taut in the air around her, instinctive and sharp.
The revenant staggered toward them with a jerking, unnatural gait, sniffing the air in ragged, hitching motions. Its broken fingers twitched, the gesture unmistakably reaching for Penelope.
Mingxi’s voice dropped, ancient and calm. “Do not let it meet your eyes.”
“I wasn’t planning on it,” Penelope said flatly.