Chapter 23
The Flame
Déjà vu overwhelmed me as the bookcase revealed another secret room.
I blew out a deep breath, watching the bookcase shift, hardly daring to believe I had got it so right.
My heart was hammering in my chest, but it was pure adrenaline alone. I wasn’t scared. Silas wouldn’t have put this here if he didn’t want me to find it.
Before the bookcase had fully shifted, I found myself moving, propelled forward by nothing more than sheer curiosity.
Only to stop dead when I took in the room behind.
“What the fuck…” I whispered, my eyes not knowing where to focus first.
I was everywhere. That much was obvious.
There were pictures of me all over the walls. From my eighteenth birthday, all the way up to the night Silas had taken me.
I stepped further into the room, reading some of the notes made near the pictures.
Isabelle and friends. Bad influences.
Isabelle and Sophie.
Isabelle and Marco. Tolerable.
Isabelle and Frank.
Frank had been circled in red, making my stomach drop.
Isabelle the night of the crash.
I grimaced at that photo. I was unconscious, blood dripping down my temples and splattered over my dress. I dropped the photo without looking too closely.
Why the fuck would he take a picture of that?
I left the photos alone, and focused on the stack of papers with my name on top.
Flicking through them, I saw a complete dossier on myself. It covered the hospital I had been born in, the nursery and schools I had attended. I saw myself at high school discos, school trips, days out.
I wasn’t overly concerned. As an heiress to a fortune, most of this could probably be found online.
Next came the more intimate stuff. The stuff you had to dig for. The stuff you had to learn.
There were medical reports, my birth control, my menstrual dates, my last checkup at the doctor’s. There were files covering the therapy I had received when my uncle was murdered, and the PTSD diagnosis I’d received.
My papers dropped from my fingers, and I let them tumble to the floor, not at all concerned about hiding my presence here.
I looked at the calendar on the wall, and saw it had been marked with a big circle.
Isabelle will need tampons.
Two days from now. I had been here almost a month.
Next, I found a file named “Luca” and snatched it up. When I opened the folder, I’d been expecting more surveillance reports. Instead, I found Luca. Us. My entire relationship with him.
My stomach twisted sharply as page after page of our conversations stared back at me.
Screenshots. Printed messages. Entire phone calls transcribed onto paper.
Some pages had notes written in the margins, whilst others had sections highlighted, dates circled, comments scribbled beside things I had said years ago and forgotten entirely.
Silas had everything.
Not just the important conversations either. Not just the dramatic moments or the nights I’d cried to Luca after arguments with my father.
Everything.
The stupid jokes.
The flirting.
The late-night conversations about films and music.
The random thoughts I’d sent at two in the morning because I couldn’t sleep.
I lowered myself slowly into the chair, my chest tight as I picked up one of the pages.
Luca: You’re awake late.
Isabelle: I could say the same to you.
Luca: If you’re awake, I’m awake, little ember
Isabelle: Want to keep me company?
Luca: What did you have in mind?
Isabelle: Make me forget, Luca. Make me feel something other than alone.
Luca: You’re never alone. I’ll always be here.
A note had been written beneath the screenshot.
She uses sex as a distraction. She’s lonely.
My brows pulled together immediately.
I did not use sex for anything other than pleasure, bastard, I thought to myself viciously.
I flicked to another page.
Isabelle: I hate this house sometimes.
Luca: Why?
Isabelle: Because nobody actually sees me here.
Luca: I see you.
Beneath that conversation, another note.
She told him she feels invisible. Why?
A horrible feeling crept up my spine.
Not fear exactly.
Violation.
Like someone had reached inside my head and spread my thoughts out across the room for inspection.
There were dozens of notes like that scattered throughout the folder.
She apologises constantly even when she’s done nothing wrong.
Why does she feel guilty for existing?
She gets defensive whenever her father is mentioned.
Asked him if she was difficult to love.
I swallowed hard and kept turning pages.
The deeper I got into the folder, the stranger it became. Some conversations had entire paragraphs highlighted. Others had dates written beside them with times and locations underneath, like Silas had cross-referenced them against something else entirely.
One page made my chest ache unexpectedly.
Isabelle: Do you think it’s possible to miss someone you’ve never met?
Luca: I miss you all the time, little ember. More than you’ll ever truly understand.
I remembered that conversation.
I had been drunk in my bedroom after one of my mother’s charity events, curled up on the floor with my heels kicked off whilst Luca kept me company over messages.
And Silas had this.
How?
That question started screaming louder in my head with every page I turned.
How the hell did he have access to all of this?
Had he hacked Luca?
Had he been watching us both?
Was Luca even safe?
My fingers tightened around the papers as panic slowly started creeping into my chest. It was then I registered that all of these text messages were appearing from Luca’s perspective.
He’d cloned Luca’s phone? How?
Another page slipped loose from the stack and fluttered onto the desk.
Isabelle: Sometimes I think I could disappear and nobody in this house would notice for days.
Luca: I’d notice.
Isabelle: That doesn’t count. You watch me like a creep. That’s an unfair advantage.
Luca: And yet you keep talking to me.
Isabelle: Because I don’t know how to let you go.
Beside that conversation, written in black ink:
She likes being observed more than she admits.
Heat crept up my neck immediately.
“No,” I muttered aloud, shoving the page away from me like it had burned me.
My eyes darted around the room suddenly, landing on the computers, the monitors, the endless evidence surrounding me.
This wasn’t normal.
None of this was normal.
The amount of effort it would have taken to build something like this made my skin crawl.
Years.
This had taken fucking years.
And yet, the more I looked around the room, the more another feeling slowly started mixing with the horror.
Confusion.
Because none of this felt random. Obsessive?
Yes. Violating? Absolutely yes. But it was careful, too.
Intentional. Every conversation had been organised meticulously.
Certain moments clearly mattered more than others.
There were sections dedicated entirely to my panic attacks after my uncle died.
Another filled with screenshots from nights where I’d spoken about wanting freedom, wanting to escape, wanting more from my life than endless parties and appearances.
One note near the middle of the folder made my stomach knot painfully.
She keeps asking Luca to save her whilst pretending she doesn’t want saving.
I stared at the words for several long seconds before turning the page quickly.
The next section was worse.
Photographs. And these were not paparazzi shots. These were private ones. Things he had to have taken himself.
I saw myself asleep on the sofa with my laptop balanced on my stomach.
Me crying in my car outside my therapist’s office.
Me laughing with Marco outside a restaurant.
Me sitting alone in the gardens at home staring at my phone.
Unease swept through me as I slowly realised something even more unsettling.
Luca knew things about me because I told him.
Silas knew things about me because he watched.
And somehow, standing in this room surrounded by evidence of both, the line between the two suddenly didn’t feel quite as separate as it should have.
Why had it been so easy for me to accept Luca into my life, and yet Silas horrified me? Weren’t they essentially doing the same thing?
My eyes fell on the section marked “sexual intimacy” and I forced the Luca folder shut before I could spiral any further. I just couldn’t look at it anymore. I couldn’t see the most intimate relationship of my life dissected so methodically.
It was horrible and invasive. Proof that something I had clung to as mine had never truly been private.
Instead, I turned to the next pile.
This one was different. It was far less emotional and much more tactical.
Frank’s name appeared first, written across the top of a thick file.
Inside were shift patterns, photographs, notes on his military background, weapons training, weaknesses, habits.
There were timestamps of every time he’d driven me somewhere, every time he’d stood outside my bedroom door, every time he’d spoken to my father when he thought I wasn’t listening.
Adrien’s file was bigger.
Much bigger.
There were photos, hotel records, bank transfers. They were accompanied by names I didn’t recognise and women I didn’t want to recognise. And then there were shipments, meetings, all of them date and time stamped.
My stomach tightened as I flicked through page after page, realising Silas hadn’t just been watching me.
He had been watching everyone around me.
There were files on my father’s guards. Notes on which ones were loyal, which ones could be bought, which ones had already been bought.
There were maps of my family estate with blind spots circled, security rotations listed down to the minute, photographs of unfamiliar cars parked outside the gates.
One note caught my eye.
Unknown vehicle outside the east gate. 02:14. Vescari plates traced. Isabelle asleep. No breach.
Another:
Frank distracted during garden walk. Western perimeter exposed for eight minutes. Corrected.
Corrected.
I swallowed hard, not sure I wanted to know what that meant. But even though I tried not to focus on it, I couldn’t help but remember just how much of a staff turnover we had. I had assumed guards were just on rotation. Now I was starting to believe something far more sinister had happened to them.
The more I read, the more the room shifted around me. It was still horrifying. Still wrong. Still a violation so deep that I didn’t know how to process it.
But it wasn’t only voyeurism.
It was protection.
Obsessive, controlling, terrifying protection.
There were screenshots from security feeds, timestamps from incidents I barely remembered, threats catalogued before I had even known they existed.
Men photographed outside restaurants. Cars following mine.
Adrien’s guards speaking into phones. Frank standing too far from me at parties.
My father leaving meetings with people I now knew were dangerous.
He was guarding me…
One file near the bottom had no name on it at all. Just a date.
I opened it carefully.
Nightclub incident. Three males identified following Isabelle into restroom corridor. Intervention required. Threat eliminated before visual contact.
My stomach tightened sharply.
I remembered that night.
I’d been drunk with friends in Mayfair and complained to Luca afterwards that some creepy men had ruined the vibe enough for Frank to drag me home early. I remembered being irritated about it for days.
I had never realised there was more to the story.
Another page sat beneath it.
Argument with Vittorio. Cried for forty-seven minutes afterwards. Did not eat dinner. Locked bedroom door. Asleep at 03:12.
My chest ached unexpectedly.
I didn’t even remember that argument specifically. There had been too many over the years. Too many nights spent crying quietly in my room whilst my parents carried on downstairs pretending we were a perfect family.
And yet Silas remembered.
Another file slipped loose as I shuffled through the stack.
Camera removed from dressing room. Distress response too severe.
I froze.
My eyes darted instinctively toward the monitors surrounding the room again.
The dressing room.
I remembered that panic attack.
I had found the hidden camera accidentally whilst getting changed and completely spiralled. I’d smashed perfume bottles everywhere, convinced Luca had crossed a boundary we had never discussed. He’d spent hours calming me down afterwards.
A horrible shiver rolled through me. Because now I realised the camera had disappeared immediately afterwards.
Because Silas removed it.
Slowly, my eyes lifted from the papers and drifted around the room one final time, taking everything in properly now. The photographs. The notes. The conversations. The years and years of obsession built brick by brick into this hidden space beneath the manor.
This was devotion twisted into something dangerous.
A cold shiver rolled through me, and for the first time since entering the room, I suddenly became aware of how quiet it had become. Every instinct in my body screamed at me to turn around.
Slowly, I pushed myself to my feet. And when I did, I stumbled backwards as I saw Silas silently standing in the doorway.
He didn’t move closer. Didn’t try to stop me.
The silver mask tilted slightly to the side, almost curious, as though he had known all along that eventually I would find my way here.