Chapter 3: The Girl Beneath the Floorboards

Chapter 3: The Girl Beneath the Floorboards

Julian’s world had compressed to the suffocating dark of the closet, the scent of cedar and Finch’s cologne thick in his throat. Through the hairline crack, Alistair Finch was a predator stalking his own territory, his expensive shoes clicking like a death watch beetle on the marble floor. Closer. He was just feet away. Julian’s hand tightened on the satchel, his knuckles white. There was no escape. This was it. The end of the line.

Desire. To become invisible. To melt into the cashmere and wool, to cease to exist until the monster passed. He held his breath, a statue carved from shadow, praying to a saint he didn't believe in.

Obstacle. Finch’s hand reached for the closet door handle. The polished brass gleamed in the ambient light from the hall. Julian saw the man’s reflection in the metal, distorted and cruel. Discovery was a fraction of a second away.

And then, the temperature in the room plummeted. A cold so profound it felt like a physical blow slammed into the space. A visible frost bloomed on the brass handle just before Finch’s fingers could touch it.

Surprise. With a deafening CRACK that vibrated through the very wood of the door, the closet slammed shut. It wasn't just closed; it was sealed. The heavy, old-fashioned bolt on the outside, which Julian had noted was purely decorative, slid home with a resonant, metallic thud. A sound made with impossible force, from the wrong side of the door.

Finch let out a startled curse, yanking his hand back. He rattled the handle. "What in the hell?" He threw his shoulder against the thick oak. It didn't budge. He slammed his fist against it. "Security! Lockdown override, code zero-zero-alpha!" he roared.

Silence was his only answer. The house remained dead, his command swallowed by the EMP-induced void Julian had created. The billionaire’s frustration quickly curdled into something else. A flicker of confusion, then a dawning sliver of fear. "Who's there? Show yourself!"

Julian remained frozen, his mind struggling to process the event. He hadn't been saved by luck. He'd been saved by the phantom. The unseen watcher. She hadn’t trapped him with Finch; she had trapped Finch away from him. The closet had become Julian's cage, and now it was his sanctuary.

Action. As Finch's furious and increasingly panicked shouts echoed from the other side of the door, another sound reached Julian’s ears. It was faint, almost lost beneath the billionaire's bellows. A soft, choked whimper. A human sound, fragile and terrified. It wasn't coming from the closet. It was coming from the bedroom.

He waited, listening to Finch's futile assault on the door. The man was trapped. For now. Moving with renewed purpose, Julian found the closet's internal emergency release—a feature for paranoid rich men who feared being locked in with their suits—and eased the door open a crack. The bedroom was empty, bathed in the cool, grey light filtering through the balcony doors. Finch’s shouting was now muffled, a caged animal’s rage.

The whimpering came again, from near the floor. From under the massive, monolithic bed.

Julian crept forward, every instinct screaming. He knelt, his tactical light cutting a sharp beam into the darkness beneath the bedframe. And he saw her. Not a ghost this time, but flesh and blood. Curled into a tight ball in the far corner was the same young woman from the mirror. Her dark eyes, wide with terror, stared back at him. She was real. He could see the frantic rise and fall of her chest, the dirt on her cheek, the tattered edge of her simple grey shift.

And on the back of her hand, raw and red against her pale skin, was the brand. A triangle inside a pentagon.

Result. He lowered the light, not wanting to frighten her further. "It's okay," he whispered, his voice rough. "I'm not with him."

She flinched, pressing herself harder against the wall. He was a man in black tactical gear who had appeared from her tormentor's closet. He couldn't blame her.

"I'm getting you out of here," he said, trying to inject a confidence he didn't feel.

Her eyes darted from him to the closet door, where Finch was now screaming threats. "You can't," she breathed, her voice a fragile, hoarse whisper. "No one can. The doors… he locks everything."

"Not anymore," Julian said. An idea sparked. He needed to connect with her, to prove he was on her side. He reached into the pouch at his belt and pulled out the cold, strangely heavy brooch. The 'phylactery'. He held it out on his palm, the occult symbol stark in the dim light. "I found this in his safe."

Her gaze fixed on the object, and a new kind of fear, mingled with something else—a flicker of awe—entered her eyes. She slowly, hesitantly, crawled out from under the bed. She was young, early twenties, but her eyes held a pain that was ageless.

"He called it the Phylactery," she whispered, her voice gaining a sliver of strength. "He said it would… bind the echo."

"What echo? What is all this?" Julian pressed, keeping his voice low. "The phone call, I heard him. The 'Lucian Covenant'. The 'vessel'."

Her face crumpled. "Me," she said, the word a shard of glass. "I'm the vessel. For his offering." She held up her branded hand. "He did this to me. To purify me for the rite. He kept me down there…" She gestured to a section of the floor near the wall that looked seamless. "He's a monster. They're all monsters."

Julian followed her gaze and saw a faint outline he'd missed in his initial sweep. A hidden door. He found the release, and a section of the floor hissed open, revealing a steep staircase leading down into darkness. The air that rose up smelled of disinfectant and despair. A cell.

She pointed to another panel, this one on the wall. "He watches everything. He controls everything."

Julian pried it open. Behind it was a bank of monitors, all dark now thanks to his EMP. Finch's paranoia made manifest. It was a cage within a gilded cage.

"He told me I was chosen," she said, her voice trembling with a building rage. "That my sacrifice would grant him power. That no one would miss me." Her name was Ynez. She was an orphan, a ghost in the system long before Finch had made her his prisoner.

Julian’s cynicism, the professional detachment that had been his armor for years, cracked. He wasn’t just a thief who’d stumbled into a kidnapping. He was a witness to a depravity he could barely comprehend. The bonds in his bag felt dirty, tainted by the same hands that had built this dungeon.

Turning Point. "But how did you lock the door?" Julian asked, the central mystery still burning in his mind. "What did you do?"

Ynez looked at him, and for the first time, the terror in her eyes was replaced by a different light. A chilling, terrifying fire. The same defiant blaze he’d seen in her spectral reflection.

"He told me I was worthless. Invisible. Alone," she said, her voice dropping to an intensity that made the hair on Julian's neck stand on end. "He was wrong. When you're that alone, you'll pray to anyone. Anything."

Finch’s yells from the closet were becoming frantic, tinged with a raw, animal terror. The sound of splintering wood came from within as he tried to break his way out.

"I prayed for a savior," Ynez went on, her gaze becoming distant, focused on something Julian couldn't see. "Or a monster of my own. I begged for something, anything, to hear me. To help me. To make him pay."

A low, guttural growl echoed through the room, seeming to come from the walls themselves. It was not the sound of a man. Finch’s screams turned into a high-pitched shriek of pure horror.

Surprise. "Ynez," Julian said, his blood turning to ice. "What did you do?"

She finally looked at him, her dark eyes reflecting an infernal light that wasn't in the room.

"I didn't do anything," she said, a single tear tracing a clean path through the grime on her cheek. "I just asked. And something… something ancient and hungry… answered."