My employer, Marcus Hollins, stood over his seven-year-old son in the glass conservatory, yelling as the boy smashed $14,000 worth of antique porcelain against the marble floor.
The memory of Jonah’s small, bleeding fingers lingered. Marcus’s face, a mask of cold fury, still burned in my mind. He’d slammed the conservatory doors shut, the crash echoing long after he ordered me back to the staff wing.
He didn’t know I knew. Not yet.
The house fell into a deep, heavy silence later that night. A thick, unsettling quiet. My heart hammered against my ribs, a drumbeat against the fear trying to take root. Sleep was impossible.
I waited until I heard the heavy, rhythmic breathing from the master bedroom, the sound carrying even through the thick walls. Marcus was finally asleep.
I slipped from my small room, the floorboards groaning underfoot despite my careful steps. The air in the staff wing was still, humid. But as I crept towards the main house, a chill began to seep into my bones, a familiar phantom cold.
It was the same cold I’d felt around Jonah in the conservatory.
A low, mournful sound reached me. It was faint at first, then grew clearer. A child’s weeping.
It wasn’t just sad. It was layered, distorted, as if two voices cried at once. My blood ran cold, but my feet kept moving. This was Jonah. My son.
The west wing stretched before me, a long, opulent corridor I rarely ventured into. It was Marcus’s private domain, the part of the house he kept under lock and key, supposedly for his adopted son, Leo. But I knew better now. I knew the truth the locket in my pocket screamed.
The weeping guided me. It pulsed from behind a heavy, carved oak door at the far end of the hall.
My hand trembled as I pushed it open.
The room inside was huge, dimly lit by a single nightlight shaped like a crescent moon. Its soft glow illuminated silver objects glinting around a small, ornate bed.
Jonah lay curled under a thick duvet, his face pressed into the pillow, his small shoulders shaking with silent sobs.
My eyes swept across the room. On every wall, placed precisely at the four cardinal points, were large, circular mirrors. Not ordinary mirrors. Their frames were intricate, etched with symbols I couldn’t quite make out in the gloom. And they weren’t reflecting the room.
They were reflecting a dull, swirling mist.
A figure stirred beside Jonah’s bed. Marcus. He wasn’t asleep. He was leaning over Jonah, whispering in a low, guttural voice I’d never heard from him before. He was holding something small and dark in his hand, pressing it gently to Jonah’s forehead.
It looked like a small, polished stone.
As he spoke, he moved another one of the silver-framed mirrors, adjusting its angle slightly. The air in the room grew colder, thick with the scent of dried herbs and something metallic. The phantom weeping quieted further, fading into a low hum.
I realized then what he was doing. He wasn’t comforting Jonah. He was binding him.
He was placing silver warding mirrors around Jonah’s bed, not to keep things out, but to suppress something *inside* my son. His ancestral memories. My heritage. The chilling realization pierced through me, sharper than any frost. He wasn’t just hiding Jonah; he was trying to erase who he was.
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