## CHAPTER 2 — THE FIRST NIGHT
Logan ordered every guard to remain at the estate.
No one was allowed to leave.
The east wing was searched twice.
No red door was found.
The hallways were covered in faded wallpaper and dust. Several rooms contained antique furniture beneath white sheets. Others had been emptied years earlier.
At the end of the corridor stood a brick wall where the original floor plan showed another passage.
“There used to be three rooms beyond this point,” Logan said.
Detective Hale studied the wall.
“Who ordered them sealed?”
“My father.”
“Why?”
“There was a fire.”
“Was anyone killed?”
Logan hesitated.
“A maintenance worker.”
Hale looked at him.
“You don’t sound certain.”
Because he wasn’t.
Logan had been nineteen at the time. His father, Edmund Mercer, had handled everything.
The repairs.
The investigation.
The settlement with the worker’s family.
By the following month, the subject had become forbidden inside the Mercer household.
Marina carried Noah upstairs to his bedroom.
The boy refused to sleep alone, so Logan allowed Marina to sit beside him.
Noah watched her with heavy eyes.
“Are the police taking you too?” he whispered.
“No.”
“Vanessa said you were bad.”
Marina brushed his hair away from his forehead.
“What do you think?”
Noah considered the question.
“I think she was scared of you.”
Marina’s expression changed.
“Why?”
“Because you found the blue medicine.”
Marina stopped moving.
Logan stood in the doorway.
“What medicine?”
She looked over her shoulder.
“Three months ago, I found a bottle in the kitchen trash. It had no pharmacy label. I asked Vanessa about it.”
“What did she say?”
“That it belonged to her.”
“But it didn’t?”
Marina looked at Noah.
“I don’t think so.”
Noah touched his throat.
“She put it in my juice.”
Logan’s hands curled into fists.
“How often?”
The boy held up four fingers.
“Four times?”
Noah shook his head.
“Four every day.”
Marina closed her eyes.
Logan felt sick.
The specialists had diagnosed Noah with trauma-related mutism, exhaustion, and delayed responses. Vanessa had insisted those symptoms proved he had a neurological disorder.
She had been drugging him.
A guard appeared in the hallway.
“Mr. Mercer, we found something in the east wing.”
“What?”
“A hidden security panel behind the wallpaper.”
Logan followed him downstairs.
The panel contained one active light.
A red light.
May you like
And beneath it was a keypad still warm from someone’s touch.
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