The mystery of the man !!

They lead me inside. The mansion is colder than I remember — too perfect, too polished, like a museum of lies.

My heels echo on the marble floor as portraits of my ancestors stare down at me, their painted smiles mocking. The air feels heavy, like it’s hiding something — a secret waiting to claw its way out.

Then I see him — my father, seated at the long dining table, a glass of red wine in his hand. The man who rules this empire of shadows.

“Welcome home, Lilith,” he says, his voice calm, deliberate. “We missed you.”

The words crawl under my skin. Around him, the others stand — my brother, my sister, the family lawyer — each face hiding something. A plan. A lie. Maybe even guilt.

Because I can feel it now — something’s wrong. The marriage isn’t the real reason they brought me back. There’s more. Something darker.

And before this night ends, someone in this room will die.

But it won’t be me

Here comes my siblings..

The silence in the mansion is suffocating. Every breath feels like a test, every step like trespassing on forbidden ground.

My father’s voice cuts through the air — smooth, controlled, and terrifyingly calm. “You’ve caused enough trouble, Lilith. Running away, disobeying, shaming our name… It’s time you understood your place.”

I want to spit back a hundred words, but something stops me — movement, subtle but real.

Aiden meets my eyes across the room. Just for a second. A silent message passes between us. He looks the same — sharp jaw, cold eyes — but I can see it in his gaze: fear. And loyalty. To me.

Then Seraphina steps forward. Her tone is sweet, almost mocking. “Father, she’s been through enough. Maybe we should let her rest before… anything else.” But I hear the shift in her voice, the quiet warning buried beneath the words: be careful. They’re listening.

I realize it then — I’m not alone. My siblings might still be trapped here, but they haven’t given up. They want out too.

My father doesn’t notice the undercurrent in the room. He’s too busy pouring himself another glass of wine. “Rest?” he repeats. “She’s had too much freedom. From now on, she stays where I can see her.”

His tone leaves no room for argument. But in my chest, something burns brighter — hope mixed with vengeance.

If Aiden and Seraphina are truly with me, then maybe… just maybe… we can tear this empire apart from the inside.

Because when blood turns against blood, no king — not even my father — can keep his throne.

Thoughts for 7s

They waited until the house finally breathed out — the last of the staff’s footsteps slipping away like water down a drain. When the corridor fell into velvet silence, the three of us moved.

Aiden slipped the lock and we eased into my room like conspirators in a play. The door closed with a soft click that sounded louder than thunder. For a heartbeat we just stood there, three shadows under the lamplight, the portraits in the hallway keeping their smug watch.

“We cut them all,” Aiden said, fingers already on the bedside table. He worked fast, practiced — a roll of black tape, a coil of wire, a small tablet glowing with schematics of the house. He’d been the one to map the security months ago, pretending to be the dutiful son while he learned where every eye and ear in this place hid. “Main feed, perimeter cams, motion sensors. Blind for thirty minutes. That’s our window.”

Seraphina closed the curtains with theatrical slowness and then laughed, the sound brittle and sharp. “Thirty minutes isn’t much. Make it count.” She moved to the wardrobe and came back with a jacket she’d stolen from a guard — heavy, too big, smelling faintly of cigarette smoke and cologne. She handed it to me.

I hugged the jacket to my chest and felt the sewing of the plan take its first real shape. We weren’t running. We were doing something more dangerous, more delicious. We weren’t merely escaping a mansion — we were going to make my father taste what it felt like to lose control.

“We don’t just leave footprints,” I said, voice low. “We leave wounds.”

Aiden nodded. “First, we get the files. The ledgers, transfer logs, encrypted drives — everything that ties him to the accounts the lawyer keeps hidden in Paris and Geneva.” He tapped the tablet. “There’s a safe behind the portrait in his study. Two minutes to crack if we use the biometric override Seraphina swiped from the gala last month.”

Seraphina’s face hardened. “And if he’s not alone? If he wakes up and finds us gone?”

“Then we make him believe I never left.” I felt the words like a blade. “We stage a trail — enough to convince the palace that I ran and was taken. The whisper-net will do the rest. He’ll deal with scandal while we take everything he values.”

It was brazen. It was reckless. It was perfect.

“We’ll need an exit,” Aiden said. “The gardener’s route — the old service gate. I can cut power to the eastern lights for fifteen minutes longer by looping the relay. After that, it looks like an electrical fault. No one will think it’s anything but bad timing.”

Seraphina set a small recorder on the nightstand, thumbed it on. “If anything goes wrong, we have truth recorded — confessions, orders, anything. We leak it. We don’t need to kill him to ruin him. People fear shame more than death.”

My breath evened. I pictured the portrait of my father in his study, the way he smiled like a man who never learned how to be surprised. The thought of him staggered by loss — reputation, power, the polite collateral that sustained him — made a cold, bright thing bloom in my chest.

“We move at midnight,” I said. “No hesitation. We split: Aiden, you go for the safe and the drives. Seraphina, you take care of the recorder and the lawyer’s office — grab whatever paper trail they have. I’ll go to Father’s study. I know where he keeps his papers. If I can get a confession — even a hint of it — we can make sure no court will let him walk.”

They exchanged a look, the kind siblings have when they decide to become a single blade.

“After that?” Seraphina asked.

“After that,” I smiled without humor, “we burn the bridges he uses to cross into the world.” Not literal fire — not yet. We would burn him in a way that mattered: money, influence, names whispered in the right ears. He would lose the things that had always bought his loyalty.

Outside the door, a clock chimed eleven. The first chime sounded like warning. The second sounded like a heartbeat. The third — just as Aiden reached for the doorknob — sounded like a bell tolling for the old order.

We moved as one. The hallway was a dark mouth; the mansion exhaled its servants into the night. We hugged the walls, ghosts among wealthy ghosts, and slipped into the belly of the house.

Halfway to the study the lights stuttered — our loop doing its work — and the hum of the security system stilled. We slowed, breath held, every step mapped to a second.

At the threshold of my father’s study, Seraphina put a hand on my arm. “Promise me one thing,” she whispered. “We come back for each other. No disappearing.”

I looked at them: my brother’s jaw clenched, my sister’s eyes bright as knives. “I promise,” I said.

The door opened.

And in the room beyond, under a halo of lamp light and a portrait that always watched, something moved. Not the slow gait of a man who sleeps at peace, but the careful, measured step of someone who had been expecting trouble for a long time.

A soft cough — and a voice I recognized like a bruise.

“You three look tired.”

We froze. The plan teetered. Outside, the thirty-minute window dwindled.

The game had begun.

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