Chapter 1 - The Crying Lady Behind the Books
At 1:47 in the morning, I caught my housekeeper’s six-year-old daughter secretly cleaning my forbidden office with her baby sister tied to her back because she believed one unfinished room would cost her family their home.
But before I could discover why her mother had disappeared, the little girl pointed at my bookcase and asked why a woman was crying inside a room no outsider knew existed.
My name is Roman Duca.
I was thirty-eight, and in Boston, people learned quickly that entering my private study without permission was a mistake they rarely made twice.
That night, I came home to my Beacon Hill mansion expecting silence.
Instead, I heard a vacuum upstairs.
I followed the sound.
On the second floor, I noticed light beneath the infirmary door. It bothered me, but the vacuum started again above me.
My study door was open.
Inside stood Mia Harper.
Her mother, Grace, had worked in my house for eight years. But Grace wasn't there.
Mia was.
The child stood on her toes, wiping my desk with trembling, red fingers.
Then she turned, and I saw her fourteen-month-old sister strapped to her back with a faded blue shawl.
The baby was asleep.
Mia grabbed the industrial vacuum and tried to push it.
It barely moved.
She pushed harder.
The baby stirred, and Mia immediately stopped to check the knots.
Then she whispered, “We have to finish before Mr. Duca gets home.”
I stayed in the doorway.
“If Mama loses this job,” she murmured, “we won't have anywhere to live.”
My jaw tightened.
Grace had served my household faithfully for eight years. Someone had made her daughter believe that missing one night of work could put them on the street.
And Grace was nowhere to be seen.
I stepped into the room.
A floorboard creaked.
Mia spun around.
The color disappeared from her face.
I switched off the vacuum and lowered myself onto the rug so I wouldn't tower over her.
“Where's your mother?”
Mia said nothing.
Her eyes moved past me.
Toward the west wall.
An enormous bookcase covered nearly all of it.
“Mia?”
She lifted one small finger.
“Mr. Duca...”
Her voice had changed.
“What?”
She stared at the shelves.
“Why does the crying lady live inside your wall?”
Every instinct I'd developed over twenty years in my world came alive.
I listened.
At first, nothing.
Rain against glass.
The radiator ticking.
Then I heard it.
So faint I almost convinced myself it wasn't real.
A woman sobbing.
Behind the bookcase.
I stood slowly.
Mia couldn't have known what was there.
My men didn't know.
My staff didn't know.
Even Grace didn't know.
Because behind that bookcase was a concealed door leading to a room my father had ordered sealed seventeen years earlier.
According to my family, nobody had entered it since.
Then the crying stopped.
Three soft knocks came from the other side of the wall.
Mia grabbed my sleeve.
And a woman's voice whispered my childhood name.
“Romy…”
My breath left me.
Nobody called me that.
Nobody living.
My mother had.
Only my mother.
I reached behind the fifth shelf and pressed the brass release my father had once shown me.
The bookcase unlocked with a low metallic click.
Mia gasped.
The shelves swung inward.
A narrow corridor stretched into darkness.
At the far end stood a locked door with warm light leaking beneath it.
I called my security chief, Luca Ferraro.
“Second floor. Now.”
He arrived in seconds.
I handed him Sophie and ordered him to keep Mia behind me.
Then I crossed the corridor.
The air smelled like dust, antiseptic, and something recent.
Someone had been using the room.
I slid open the external bolt.
The door swung inward.
A barefoot woman sat against the wall.
Dark hair. Bruised wrists. Split lip.
Alive.
I knew her face from photographs.
Elena Duca.
My father’s second wife.
The woman who had supposedly drowned seventeen years earlier.
She looked up at me and whispered, “Roman.”
I stared.
“You’re dead.”
“No.”
Then she looked past me toward Luca.
Fear flooded her face.
“Not him.”
I turned.
Before I could speak, Mia screamed from the study.
“MR. DUCA!”
I ran.
The front hall below was open to the rain.
A woman rushed through the foyer.
Grace.
“Mama!” Mia screamed.
Grace looked up once.
Then ran out into the storm.
By the time I reached the front door, she was gone.
Only her staff badge remained on the marble floor.
May you like
Four words had been written across it in blood.
DON’T TRUST THE FAMILY.
