The humidity of a Washington summer didn’t stop at the limestone walls of the Holloway estate; it seeped through the cracks, thick and cloying, smelling of rain-slicked boxwood and old, inherited dust. Inside the grand hall, the air felt pressurized, a vacuum waiting for a spark. It came in the form of shattering porcelain—a hand-painted Meissen urn that had survived three generations of Holloway Christmases, now reduced to jagged white teeth across the checkerboard marble.

Then came the scream. It wasn’t the cry of a child; it was the sound of something tearing, a raw, jagged animalistic noise that vibrated in the silver service on the sideboard.

“Get your hands off my son! Now!”

Richard Holloway’s voice didn’t just carry; it commanded. He descended the mahogany staircase with the lethal grace of a man accustomed to dismantling boardrooms. His silk tie was loosened, his shirtsleeves rolled up to reveal forearms corded with tension. He was an industrial titan, a man who built skyscrapers and broke unions, yet as he rounded the banister, his face was a mask of terrified, impotent fury.

At the center of the hall, the chaos had crystallized into a tableau of misery. Lucas, nine years old and looking half his age in a navy school blazer, was a whirlwind of flailing limbs and choked gasps. His chest heaved with a rhythmic, violent desperation. Opposite him, Maribel Cruz was on her knees.

A shard of the broken urn had grazed her shoulder during the outburst, blooming a dark red stain through the fabric of her cream blouse, but she hadn’t flinched. She reached out, her fingers hovering inches from the boy’s trembling shoulders.

“Miss Cruz, step away from him!” Thomas, the estate’s long-serving butler, took a tentative step forward, his white-gloved hands twitching.

Beside him, Dr. Allison Moore, the latest in a long line of expensive failures, clutched her clipboard to her chest like a shield. “He’s entered a fugue state, Richard,” she stammered, her glasses slipping down her nose. “Sedation is the only—”

“I didn’t hire you to debate me, Allison,” Richard hissed, his eyes fixed on Maribel. “And I didn’t hire you to manhandle him, Cruz. Move!”

But Maribel didn’t move. She didn’t even look up at the man who signed her paychecks. She stayed in the debris, her voice a low, melodic anchor in the storm. “It’s okay,” she whispered, the sound barely audible over Lucas’s ragged breathing. “You’re overwhelmed. I know that feeling. The world is too loud, isn’t it, Lucas? It’s too sharp.”

The boy let out a guttural sob and lunged. It wasn’t a hug. It was an attack. He sank his teeth into Maribel’s forearm, his small hands locking into the fabric of her sleeves.

“Lucas!” Richard roared, lunging forward.

“No!” Maribel’s command was quiet but absolute. It stopped Richard in his tracks, a sensation he hadn’t experienced in twenty years. “Don’t touch him. If you touch him now, you’ll lose him.”

Blood began to bead and then trail down Maribel’s arm, staining the white lace of her cuff. She didn’t pull away. She didn’t even wince. Instead, she leaned into the pain, her eyes locking onto the boy’s blown-out, terrified pupils.

“Look at me,” she murmured. “You’re scared. That doesn’t make you bad. It just means you’re carrying too much.”

For a heartbeat that felt like an hour, the only sound in the cavernous hall was the ticking of the grandfather clock and the wet, frantic gasping of the child. Then, the miracle happened. The tension bled out of Lucas’s jaw. His teeth released. His fingers uncurled from her sleeves, and he collapsed against her chest, his forehead resting in the hollow of her neck.

The violent tremors replaced by the rhythmic shaking of deep, exhausted weeping.

Thomas let out a breath he seemed to have been holding since the previous autumn. “He hasn’t let anyone touch him… not since Jonathan passed,” the old man whispered, his voice cracking.

Richard felt the heat of his rage vanish, leaving behind a cold, hollow cavern of shame. He looked at his son—the heir to the Holloway fortune, a boy he had tried to “fix” with the best doctors and the strictest tutors—and saw, for the first time, a drowning survivor clinging to a life raft.

Maribel looked up then. Her face was pale, sweat beading at her temples, but her gaze was steady. “He wasn’t trying to hurt me, Mr. Holloway,” she said softly, stroking the back of the boy’s head. “He was fighting the world. And right now, the world is winning.”

Richard swallowed hard. The silence of the house, usually so dignified and hollow, suddenly felt heavy with the weight of the things they didn’t talk about: the empty bedroom at the end of the hall, the funeral flowers that had long since dried to dust, and the silence of a father who knew how to build cities but didn’t know how to hold his own child.

“Get the first aid kit, Thomas,” Richard said, his voice stripped of its steel.

He watched as Maribel gathered the boy into her arms, lifting him as if he weighed nothing at all. As she carried him toward the library, the light from the clerestory windows caught the blood on her arm, turning it to rubies.

Richard stood alone in the center of the hall, surrounded by the shards of his history. He looked at the empty space where his son had just been and realized that the foundation of his life hadn’t just cracked; it had shifted entirely.

The storm outside finally broke, rain lashing against the glass, but inside, the air had finally cleared. He knew then, with a sinking certainty that felt like both a death and a birth, that nothing in this house would ever be the same again.

The weeks that followed were a study in soft edges. The Holloway mansion, once a museum of silent grievances, began to breathe. It started small: the heavy velvet drapes in the morning room were pulled back to let in the bruised light of dawn; the metronomic ticking of the clocks was softened by the low hum of a radio in the kitchen; and Maribel Cruz became the quiet ghost that haunted the hallways, not with fear, but with a terrifying kind of grace.

Richard watched her from the shadows of his study. He saw the way she moved with Lucas—never hovering, never demanding, but always there, a constant northern star.

One evening, he found them in the overgrown gardens at the back of the estate. The sun was dipping below the Potomac, casting long, skeletal shadows across the unmanicured lawn. Lucas was sitting in the dirt, his expensive trousers ruined, digging at the roots of an old oak tree. Maribel sat beside him, her back against the bark, reading aloud from a weathered book of poetry.

“You’re letting him get filthy,” Richard said, though the bite was gone from his tone. He stepped out onto the patio, a glass of scotch sweating in his hand.

Maribel didn’t look up from her page. “Dirt washes off, Richard. It’s the things we bury inside that stay stained.”

He winced at the use of his first name—a boundary crossed without permission—but he didn’t correct her. He couldn’t. Not when he saw the way Lucas’s hand stayed steady as he moved a worm from the soil to the grass.

“The doctors say he needs structure,” Richard said, leaning against the stone balustrade. “They say he needs a ‘controlled environment.’”

“The doctors see a patient,” Maribel said, finally closing the book. She looked at Richard, her dark eyes piercing the twilight. “I see a boy who is tired of being a project. He doesn’t need a controlled environment. He needs a place where it’s okay to be broken.”

“And you think this is that place?” Richard gestured to the looming, dark mass of the house behind them. “This house is a monument to a man who isn’t here anymore. Every floorboard, every painting… it’s all Jonathan. How is a boy supposed to grow in a tomb?”

Maribel stood up, dusting the earth from her skirt. She walked toward him, stopping just inside his personal space. The scent of her—lavender and medicinal soap—cut through the heavy aroma of his scotch.

“Then stop living in a tomb,” she said.

Before he could respond, she turned and called to Lucas. The boy stood up, his face streaked with mud, and ran to her. He didn’t flinch when she took his hand. He didn’t pull away.

Richard watched them walk back toward the house, their silhouettes merging into the deepening purple of the dusk. He felt a sudden, sharp pang of jealousy—not of Maribel, but of the ease with which she occupied his son’s world. A world he had been locked out of the moment the coffin lid had closed on his brother.

Jonathan had been the golden one. The father Lucas adored, the brother Richard had both loved and envied. When the car accident took him, it didn’t just take a man; it took the gravity that held the Holloway family together. Richard had stepped in to provide, to protect, to build a fortress around the wreckage. But he had forgotten that a fortress is also a cage.

That night, Richard didn’t go to bed. He stayed in his study, surrounded by ledgers and blueprints, but for the first time in years, he wasn’t looking at the numbers. He was looking at a photograph on his desk—a grainy shot of him and Jonathan as children, standing on the same lawn where Lucas had just been digging in the dirt.

They had been happy then. Before the money, before the weight of the name.

A floorboard creaked in the hallway.

Richard froze. He set his glass down and walked to the door. The hallway was lit only by the dim emergency lights near the floor. At the far end, near Lucas’s room, a figure was sitting on the floor.

It was Maribel. She was leaning against the doorframe of the boy’s room, her head tilted back, her eyes closed. She wasn’t sleeping; she was listening. Listening to the rhythmic, peaceful breathing of a child who was finally, for one night, not fighting the world.

Richard started to approach, but stopped. There was a sanctity to the scene that he felt he would shatter if he spoke.

She opened her eyes and saw him. She didn’t move. In the dim light, the scar on her arm from Lucas’s bite was a pale, jagged line.

“He’s dreaming,” she whispered.

“How do you know?” Richard asked, his voice a ghost of itself.

“Because he isn’t grinding his teeth,” she said. “He’s safe, Richard. For now.”

“And tomorrow?”

Maribel stood up slowly, her joints complaining in the quiet. “Tomorrow we do it again. And the day after that. Until he realizes he doesn’t have to bite to be heard.”

She began to walk past him, heading toward her own quarters, but Richard reached out and caught her sleeve. It was an impulsive gesture, one born of a desperate, sudden need for contact.

“Why are you doing this?” he asked. “Most people would have quit the first time he threw something. Or the first time he drew blood. Why stay?”

Maribel looked down at his hand on her arm, then up at his face. The hardness in her eyes softened into something that looked dangerously like pity.

“Because I know what it’s like to be the one everyone wants to ‘fix,’” she said. “And because I know that the only way out of the dark is to have someone willing to sit in it with you.”

She gently disengaged her arm and walked away, leaving Richard standing in the shadows of his own history.

The midpoint of the summer arrived with a heatwave that turned the Potomac into a shimmering sheet of lead. The air was so thick it felt like breathing water. Inside the mansion, the air conditioning hummed a low, constant note of defiance.

It was during this week of stifling heat that the truth began to unravel.

Richard was in the library, attempting to focus on a merger that would solidify Holloway Industries’ dominance in the Pacific Northwest, when Thomas entered without knocking. The old butler’s face was the color of damp parchment.

“Sir,” Thomas said, his hand trembling as he held out a manila envelope. “This arrived by courier. It’s marked ‘Personal and Confidential.’ From the firm of Sterling & Graves.”

Richard frowned. Sterling & Graves had been Jonathan’s lawyers. “That’s impossible. Jonathan’s estate was settled years ago.”

“I believe you should read it, sir.”

Richard tore open the envelope. Inside were three sheets of heavy bond paper and a small, tarnished silver key.

As he read, the room seemed to tilt. The words blurred and refocused: Codicil… safety deposit box… Maribel Cruz… 2018.

The date was two years before the accident.

Richard dropped the papers onto the desk. The air in the library suddenly felt thinner, colder. He looked at the key. It was a key to a private locker at the National Bank.

“Where is she?” Richard asked, his voice low and dangerous.

“In the conservatory, sir. With Master Lucas.”

Richard didn’t walk; he stormed. He burst through the glass doors of the conservatory, the smell of damp earth and blooming jasmine hitting him like a physical blow. Lucas was sitting at a small table, meticulously painting a wooden birdhouse. Maribel was standing behind him, her hand resting lightly on his shoulder.

“Lucas, go to your room,” Richard said.

The boy looked up, his eyes wide with the sudden return of the old, familiar tension. “But Dad, I’m almost finished—”

“Now!”

Lucas flinched. The paintbrush dropped, staining the white tablecloth with a blotch of primary blue. He scrambled out of his chair and ran past his father, his footsteps echoing like gunshots on the tile.

Maribel didn’t move. She didn’t look afraid. She looked… resigned.

“You knew him,” Richard said, the words tasting like ash. He held up the letter. “You didn’t just ‘apply’ for this job. You were written into my brother’s will two years before he died.”

Maribel took a slow breath, her gaze moving to the spilled blue paint. “I never said I didn’t know him, Richard.”

“You lied! You stood in my house, you took my money, you let me believe you were a stranger who just happened to have a ‘gift’ for my son. Who are you? Was he paying you? Were you his mistress? His—”

“Stop it,” Maribel said. The quietness of her voice was more powerful than his shouting. “I was his nurse. Before the accident. Before the world knew Jonathan Holloway was sick.”

Richard froze. “Sick? Jonathan wasn’t sick. He was… he was the healthiest man I knew.”

“He had early-onset Parkinson’s, Richard. The tremors had started. The lapses. He was terrified. He didn’t want the board to know. He didn’t want you to know. He thought you’d see it as a weakness, a crack in the Holloway armor.”

Richard felt a phantom pain in his chest. Jonathan, his vibrant, unstoppable brother, hiding behind a nurse in the shadows.

“He hired me to help him manage it,” Maribel continued, her eyes glistening now. “But it wasn’t just the illness. He was worried about Lucas. He saw the same signs in the boy that he felt in himself—the sensitivity, the overwhelming sensory input. He knew that if anything happened to him, you would try to build Lucas into a soldier. He knew you’d try to make him like you.”

“And what’s wrong with being like me?” Richard demanded, though his voice lacked conviction.

“Nothing, if you want to be a machine,” Maribel said. “But Lucas isn’t a machine. He’s a child who lost his father. Jonathan’s last request wasn’t about money or stocks. It was that I find a way into this house if he ever died. He knew you’d push everyone away. He knew you’d turn this place into a fortress of grief.”

Richard slumped into the chair Lucas had just vacated. He looked at the blue stain on the table. “He didn’t trust me.”

“He loved you,” Maribel said, stepping closer. “But he knew you. You solve problems by conquering them, Richard. You don’t know how to surrender. And grief… grief is a surrender.”

The silence that followed was different from the ones before. It wasn’t a silence of secrets, but a silence of realization. Richard looked at the silver key on the table.

“What’s in the box?”

“Letters,” Maribel said. “One for you. One for Lucas. And the legal authority for me to stay, regardless of what you wanted.”

Richard laughed, a harsh, dry sound. “So you’ve been a Trojan horse. A spy sent from the grave.”

“I’ve been a promise,” she corrected. “I promised a dying man I wouldn’t let his son drown in this house. If that makes me a spy, then I’m a spy.”

Richard looked out at the garden, where the shadows were once again stretching across the lawn. He felt small. For all his billions, for all his power, he had been the only one in the dark.

“I should fire you,” he said.

“You could,” Maribel replied. “But you won’t. Because for the first time in two years, your son is laughing. And you know that if I leave, that laughter leaves with me.”

She was right. He hated her for it, and he loved her for it.

“Go to him,” Richard said, waving a hand toward the stairs. “He’s probably terrified I’m going to send him away.”

Maribel paused at the door. “He’s not the only one who’s terrified, Richard.”

The crisis came not with a bang, but with a whimper—and then a fire.

Two nights after the revelation in the conservatory, a dry thunderstorm rolled over Georgetown. Lightning fractured the sky, but no rain fell to cool the parched earth.

Richard was in his study, the letter from Jonathan open on the desk. He had read it a hundred times. Rich, don’t be a hero. Just be a brother. Just be a father. The buildings don’t matter. The boy does.

A sudden, sharp smell of ozone and burnt wood jolted him upright.

He ran to the hallway. Smoke was curling from the vents—thick, acrid, and black. “Thomas! Maribel!”

A lightning strike had hit the old servant’s quarters at the rear of the house, igniting the dry timber of the attic. The fire was spreading with terrifying speed, fueled by the drafty hallways and the antique rugs.

“Lucas!” Richard screamed, sprinting toward the boy’s room.

He burst inside. The room was empty. The window was open, the sheer curtains flapping in the hot wind like ghosts.

“Maribel!”

He found them on the roof of the portico. Lucas had panicked at the smell of smoke and climbed out the window, sliding down the pitched roof until he was trapped on the narrow ledge. Maribel was there, her feet braced against the gutter, her arms wrapped around the sobbing boy.

The fire was roaring behind them now, orange light spilling out of the bedroom windows.

“Richard!” Maribel shouted over the roar of the flames. “The ladder! The trellis won’t hold both of us!”

Richard didn’t wait for Thomas or the fire department. He climbed onto the ledge, his leather shoes slipping on the slate. The heat was immense, singeing his hair, blistering the skin on his face.

“Give him to me!” Richard reached out.

Lucas was catatonic with fear, his fingers locked into Maribel’s sweater.

“Lucas, look at me!” Richard yelled. “It’s Dad! I’ve got you! I promise, I’ve got you!”

The boy turned his head. In the flickering firelight, Richard saw the reflection of a thousand fears in his son’s eyes. But he also saw something else: a flicker of trust.

Lucas let go of Maribel and reached for his father.

Richard grabbed him, pulling the boy’s small body against his chest with a strength he didn’t know he possessed. He swung Lucas back through the window of a lower hallway, where Thomas was waiting with wet blankets.

But as Richard turned back for Maribel, the roof groaned.

A section of the chimney, weakened by the heat and the strike, buckled. Bricks cascaded down like mortar shells. Maribel tried to jump, but her foot caught in the gutter. She fell backward, her head striking the stone ledge before she tumbled into the darkness of the hydrangea bushes below.

“Maribel!”

Richard scrambled down the trellis, ignoring the splinters and the heat. He found her crumpled in the dirt, her face pale, a dark line of blood running from her temple.

He knelt beside her, the roar of the fire department’s sirens growing louder in the distance. He picked her up, her head lolling against his shoulder.

“Don’t you die,” he hissed, his voice cracking. “You hear me? You haven’t finished the book. Lucas needs the end of the book.”

Her eyes fluttered open, glassy and unfocused. She looked up at the burning mansion—at the monument to the past finally being consumed by the present.

“The tomb…” she whispered. “It’s gone.”

“Let it burn,” Richard said, tears finally breaking through the soot on his face. “Let the whole damn thing burn.”

The aftermath was a quiet affair. The Holloway mansion wasn’t destroyed, but the upper floors were gutted, the marble floors stained by soot and water. It would take a year to fix, the architects said.

Richard told them not to bother.

He bought a smaller house, a place of wood and glass on the coast of Maine, where the air tasted of salt and the only clocks were the tides.

Six months later, Richard stood on the deck of the new house, watching the gray Atlantic churn. Inside, he could hear the sound of a piano—clunky, hesitant notes as Lucas practiced a simple melody.

Maribel sat in a lounge chair nearby, a thick scarf wrapped around her neck. She still walked with a slight limp, and a thin scar marked her temple, but her eyes were clear.

“He’s getting better,” she said, nodding toward the music.

Richard sat on the edge of her chair. He looked at his hands—the hands of a man who used to only build with steel. Now, they were calloused from gardening, stained with the ink of letters he wrote to his son every night.

“We both are,” Richard said.

He reached out and took her hand. For the first time, it wasn’t a gesture of desperation or a command. It was a simple, quiet acknowledgment.

“Jonathan knew,” Richard whispered. “He knew I couldn’t do it alone.”

“Nobody can, Richard,” Maribel said, leaning her head back against the wood. “That was the secret he was trying to tell you. We’re all just biting the world until someone tells us it’s okay to stop.”

Out on the horizon, the sun broke through the clouds, turning the cold water to gold. The music from inside the house grew steadier, the notes finding their rhythm, rising up to meet the sound of the wind.

The Holloway name still carried weight, but here, in the salt air and the silence, it didn’t feel like a burden anymore. It felt like a beginning.

Richard watched his son come out onto the deck, a wooden birdhouse in his hands, his face bright with a simple, uncomplicated joy. The boy didn’t hesitate. He ran to Richard, and Richard opened his arms, catching him, holding him, and finally, after a lifetime of building walls, letting them all fall down.

The past was a ghost, and the future was a mystery, but for the first time in his life, Richard Holloway was exactly where he was supposed to be.

Five years later, the Maine coastline had a way of carving people down to their truest selves. The salt spray polished the jagged rocks, and the unrelenting wind swept away the pretenses of the city.

The “New Holloway House” was a structure of cedar and glass, perched precariously over the Atlantic. It didn’t boast marble foyers or velvet drapes. Instead, it was filled with the smell of pine resin, stacked books, and the constant, rhythmic thrum of the ocean—a natural metronome that seemed to keep the household’s heartbeat in sync.

Richard Holloway stood in the kitchen, a space designed for living rather than for show. He was wearing an old flannel shirt, his fingers stained with soil from the greenhouse. He was no longer the man who moved markets with a phone call; he was a man who grew heirloom tomatoes and understood the delicate temperament of a coastal garden.

He looked out the floor-to-ceiling window. Down on the narrow strip of shingle beach, two figures were navigating the tide pools.

Lucas, now fourteen, was tall and wiry, his movements possessing a newfound coordination that had once seemed impossible. He carried a sketchbook tucked under his arm. He didn’t flinch when the waves crashed against the rocks, nor did he recoil from the spray. He moved with the tide, not against it. Beside him, Maribel walked with the slow, deliberate grace of a woman who had made peace with her scars.

The door creaked open, admitting a gust of cold, briny air as the two stepped inside.

“The tide’s coming in fast,” Lucas said, his voice dropping into a burgeoning baritone. He set his sketchbook on the oak table. “The light was perfect, though. Everything looked… silver.”

“Let me see,” Richard said, stepping over.

Lucas flipped the book open. It wasn’t a blueprint or a ledger. It was a charcoal study of the old lighthouse at the point. The lines were bold, confident, but there was a softness in the shading—a sensitivity that had once been a source of terror and was now his greatest strength.

“You captured the wind,” Richard murmured, resting a hand on his son’s shoulder. Lucas didn’t pull away; he leaned into the touch, a casual, unconscious gesture that still brought a lump to Richard’s throat.

Maribel hung her coat by the door. She looked at the two of them—the titan and the artist—and a small, knowing smile touched her lips. She still saw the shadows of the Georgetown mansion in the way Richard watched his son, but those shadows were fading, replaced by the vivid reality of the present.

“Thomas called from D.C.,” Maribel mentioned, moving to the stove to start a pot of tea. “The foundation wants to know if you’ll be attending the opening of the Jonathan Holloway Memorial Center next month.”

The silence that followed was no longer heavy. It was reflective. The center wasn’t a corporate headquarters; it was a sanctuary for neurodivergent children, a place designed with the sensory-friendly architecture that Jonathan had dreamed of but never dared to build.

“I think we should go,” Richard said, his eyes meeting Lucas’s. “All of us.”

Lucas nodded slowly. “I want to bring the sketches. Maybe they can use some of them for the murals in the common room.”

“I think your father would have liked that,” Richard said.

As the sun began its slow descent into the Atlantic, painting the room in hues of copper and violet, Richard realized that the fire five years ago hadn’t just destroyed a house; it had performed a necessary alchemy. It had burned away the steel and the stone to reveal the pulse underneath.

They sat down to dinner, not as a dynasty, but as a family. There were no white-gloved servants, no silent grievances, and no biting of the world. There was only the sound of the wind, the clink of silverware, and the quiet, steady breathing of three people who had survived the dark and found their way to the shore.

Richard looked at Maribel, and then at his son, and he finally understood what Jonathan had known all along. The greatest monuments aren’t built of limestone and ego. They are built of the moments when we choose to stay, the moments when we choose to listen, and the quiet, fierce courage it takes to simply be whole.

The ending arrived not with a grand ceremony, but in the quiet, bruised light of a D.C. autumn.

The Jonathan Holloway Memorial Center stood on the same block where Jonathan had once walked to work, but it looked nothing like the glass-and-steel monoliths that bore the family name. It was a building of soft curves, cedar slats, and light-drenched courtyards. It didn’t demand attention; it offered shelter.

On the night before the official opening, the building was empty of dignitaries. Only Richard, Lucas, and Maribel stood in the central atrium.

Lucas walked to the far wall, where his sketches had been enlarged into a sweeping mural of the Maine coastline. He traced the line of a charcoal wave with his fingers, his expression serene. He was no longer the boy who shattered porcelain; he was the young man who understood the beauty of the break.

Richard stood back, watching his son. He felt a presence beside him—Maribel, dressed in a simple dark suit, her eyes reflecting the soft glow of the recessed lighting.

“He looks like him tonight,” Richard whispered. “Not the illness. Not the fear. Just the spirit.”

“He looks like himself, Richard,” Maribel corrected gently. “And that’s the greatest tribute Jonathan could have asked for.”

Richard reached into his pocket and pulled out the small, tarnished silver key—the one that had unlocked the safety deposit box five years ago. He walked to the memorial plaque near the entrance, where a small, recessed compartment had been built into the stone. He placed the key inside and closed the glass, sealing it away.

He didn’t need the key anymore. The secrets were gone, and the promises had been kept.

As they walked out of the center and into the cool evening air, Richard looked back one last time. Through the glass, he could see the mural, the light, and the space they had built for the children who would come after. The Holloway legacy was no longer a weight to be carried; it was a door to be opened.

The three of them walked toward the car, their shadows lengthening on the sidewalk, merging into one. The city hummed around them, loud and chaotic as ever, but inside the circle they formed, there was only peace.

The story that had begun with a scream in a grand hall had ended in the silence of a job well done.

Richard took Maribel’s hand on one side and Lucas’s on the other. Together, they stepped out of the past and into the night, leaving the ghosts behind in the light.