Not sneaking exactly, because sneaking implies haste or guilt. These steps carry routine. Practice. He has done this before. Many times. Perhaps every night since the first cup of “valerian.” That realization makes nausea rise in your throat.
The door opens.
You keep your eyes closed.
The floorboards whisper beneath his weight. The room changes pressure the way it does when another body enters, and some primitive part of you wants to bolt, to run, to throw yourself through the rain-dark hallway screaming until the old portraits rattle from the walls. But fear, when it is useful, does not run. It listens.
Alejandro comes to the bed.
You feel his presence beside you, close enough that the smell of him reaches you: clean starch from his shirt, tobacco he thinks you do not notice, and that same medicinal sweetness that had been under the tea. For a moment he says nothing.
Then, softly, almost fondly, “You always were easy to trust.”
Your whole body turns to ice beneath the blanket.
You hear him bend, perhaps to look closer at your face. One finger brushes hair away from your forehead. The gesture is intimate in a way that feels deeply wrong, not sensual exactly but possessive, as if checking the condition of something that belongs to him.
“Soon,” he murmurs. “Just a little longer.”
Then he moves away.
You hear the wardrobe door open.
A rustle of fabric.
Then a click, faint and metallic, followed by the soft scrape of wood against plaster. A hidden latch. A concealed door. Your room has secrets inside it. The old house, apparently, has been keeping more than grief in its walls.
You risk the smallest slit of vision beneath your lashes.
Alejandro is half hidden behind the wardrobe. A narrow panel in the wall stands open where there should only be floral wallpaper and old cedar. Beyond it, darkness. He slips through sideways carrying a lantern you never saw him light. The panel closes behind him almost soundlessly.
For a second you remain frozen.
Then all hesitation snaps.
You throw off the blanket, swing your feet to the floor, and nearly fall because adrenaline has made your legs feel not weak but unreal. The room tilts, not from drugging now but from the simple fact that your life has just split into before and after.
You cross to the wardrobe.
Up close, the hidden panel is better disguised than it seemed from bed. A seam concealed by carved trim. A brass catch sunken into the wall behind one hanging winter coat. If you did not know exactly where to press, you would never find it. Your brother has been entering and leaving your room through a secret passage in the wall, night after night, while you lay unconscious.
The catch releases under your thumb.
Cold, damp air breathes out from the darkness beyond.
You take the lamp from your desk, turn the flame low, and step through.
The passage is narrow enough that your shoulders nearly brush both sides. Old stone, not plaster. The inside of the house stripped to its skeleton. The air smells of mold, dust, and something deeper beneath that, something animal and stale. A set of steep steps angles downward. Your heart knocks against your ribs with such force you press a hand to your chest as if that might quiet it.
Mamá warned you about the basement once.
Not directly. Never with one clear sentence. It had happened a month before she died, one of the last lucid afternoons before the morphine thickened her mind into fragments. Rain had been falling then too. You were helping change her bedsheets when she gripped your wrist with startling strength and said, “If Alejandro ever tells you the house is protecting you, don’t believe the floor.”
You had thought the pain was making her speak in riddles.
Now the memory returns like a blade pulled from cloth.
The steps turn once and continue downward.
You move slowly, one hand on the wall, lamp trembling in the other. At the bottom, the passage opens into a corridor beneath the house. Not a proper cellar of the kind built for wine and preserves, but something older. Rough stone arches. Thick support columns. The remains of a colonial foundation maybe, sealed away behind renovations generations ago. The kind of place families with money pretend no longer exists because old houses have old sins embedded in the brick.
Voices reach you.
Alejandro’s first.
“…another few days and she’ll sign anything.”
Then another voice answers, male and unfamiliar, low and irritated. “You said the girl was already pliant.”
Girl. The word slithers through you.
Alejandro laughs under his breath. “She is. Mostly. But grief made her suspicious for a while. I had to increase the dosage after she started asking about the bank papers.”
Bank papers.
You go colder.
