Brooke Beretta |work| May 2026

"No," Brooke said. Her voice was hoarse from months of disuse. "I killed it."

I have done something terrible. To stop Silas, I used the house against him. I reversed the geometry—turned the key the other way. The door opened, but not where they expected. It opened inside them. They are still here, all twelve of them and Blackwood and my husband, but they are not alive. They are part of the house now. The faces on the banister? Those are the servants. The pattern in the parquet floor? That is Blackwood's spine. brooke beretta

Brooke hung up and spent the next four hours doing exactly what Julian Cross had told her not to do: she tried to research the Ashworth House. But it was as if the place had been erased from memory. The local historical society's online archives returned nothing. Newspaper databases from the 1890s through the 1920s had no mention of the address. Even a search of property records showed only a blank placeholder—the house existed, but its past had been meticulously scrubbed. "No," Brooke said