SOLD TO THE DEVIL KING

CHAPTER 8: SHADOWS BEHIND THE WALLS

"Don't turn around... they're following you."

The whisper brushed past my ear as I walked through one of the mansion's quieter corridors, so faint I almost convinced myself I'd imagined it. I stiffened, every muscle locking in place, but I didn't turn. Whoever had spoken knew exactly what they were doing. By the time I found the courage to glance behind me, the corridor stood empty, nothing but shadow and the faint echo of my own heartbeat pounding in my ears.

I had no idea who'd warned me. I only knew, with cold certainty, that someone in this house was watching closely enough to know when danger walked behind me.

I couldn't ignore it. Not after everything else.

I made my way back to the hidden hallway I'd found days earlier, moving carefully through servant corridors I was only beginning to memorize. The panel sat exactly where I'd left it, though new scratches marked the stone around its edges, thin and deliberate, as though someone had pried at it recently with something sharper than fingers.

Fresh footprints trailed into the darkness beyond, and a breeze drifted up from somewhere below, carrying the scent of old dust and older stone.

I checked the corridor twice before slipping through the gap.

The passage twisted downward almost immediately, narrower than I expected, the walls close enough to brush my shoulders on either side. The stonework here was different from the rest of the mansion, rougher, older, built by hands that had nothing to do with Dante's polished marble halls above. These tunnels had existed long before he ever claimed this estate. I wondered, as I pressed deeper into the dark, how many secrets had been buried down here over the decades, and how many people had walked this same path before me.

"You're making dangerous enemies."

I spun so fast I nearly lost my footing. Marco stood at the mouth of the passage behind me, arms loosely crossed, no anger in his expression at all.

"Were you following me?"

"In this house," he said, a faint smile touching his mouth, "trust is a luxury. I make it my business to know where people go." He tilted his head toward the darkness behind me. "You shouldn't be down here alone."

"Then tell me what's down here."

"Not my secret to share." He fell into step beside me as I climbed back toward the panel, his voice dropping lower. "Alessia, listen carefully. Not everyone in this house wears their loyalty where you can see it. Some people smile at you in the daylight and work against you the moment the sun goes down."

"Is that a warning, or a confession?"

His smile didn't waver, but something behind his eyes sharpened. "Take it however keeps you breathing."

I knew something was wrong the moment I stepped into my room.

Nothing had been stolen. My few belongings still sat where I'd left them. But the drawer beside my bed hung open by an inch, a gap I was certain hadn't existed that morning. The chair near the window had been shifted, its angle subtly wrong. My wardrobe doors didn't quite meet flush the way I always left them.

My pulse quickened as I crossed to the small stack of folded clothing where I'd hidden the one possession that mattered most, my father's signet ring, smuggled out of the ashes of my old life and hidden beneath fabric where no one should have thought to look.

It had been moved. Not taken, only shifted, as though someone had lifted it, studied it, and set it back down with careful, deliberate hands.

Someone had searched my room. Someone had been looking for something specific, and I had no way of knowing whether they'd found it.

I sat on the edge of my bed afterward, trying to steady my breathing, and my hand brushed against something beneath the pillow that hadn't been there that morning.

A small silver locket, cool against my palm, its surface worn smooth with age.

My fingers trembled as I worked the delicate clasp open. Inside sat a tiny photograph, faded at the edges but unmistakable. My mother, my father, and a much younger version of myself, laughing at something outside the frame, taken years before gunfire had ever touched our lives.

I hadn't seen this photograph in years. I hadn't even known it still existed.

Tears burned at the corners of my eyes, and I forced them back, forced myself to focus on the impossible truth sitting in my palm instead of the grief threatening to swallow me whole. Someone in this house knew exactly who I'd been before the m******e. Someone had access to a memory I'd believed had burned along with everything else that night.

I overheard the conversation only in fragments, drifting through the hallway outside Dante's study as I passed with an armful of linens I no longer remembered carrying.

"From now on," Dante was saying, his voice low and final, "she doesn't move through this estate alone."

Luca's response was too quiet to catch, but I heard the door shift as he left, his footsteps measured and obedient despite whatever reservations he still carried.

I found Dante a moment later, and the words left me before I could stop them. "I don't need a guard shadowing me through my own room."

"It's not a request."

"You could at least explain why."

He studied me for a long moment, something unreadable moving behind his eyes, and for a heartbeat I thought he might actually answer. Then he turned and walked away, leaving the question hanging unanswered in the corridor, the same way he left every question I asked him.

I didn't know whether to be grateful for the protection, or afraid of exactly what it meant that he thought I needed it.

Back in my room, I turned the locket over in my hands, studying it under the lamplight. Something about the frame caught my attention, faint scratches along the inner edge, too deliberate to be accidental wear.

I carefully pried the photograph loose.

Words waited on the back, written in faded black ink, cramped and hurried, as though whoever had written them had been afraid of being caught in the act.

The traitor sleeps under Dante's roof.

My blood ran cold. I read the words again, certain I'd misunderstood them, but they remained exactly the same the second time. The enemy I'd been searching for wasn't hiding somewhere beyond these walls. The enemy already lived inside them, close enough to search my room, close enough to slip a childhood photograph beneath my pillow, close enough to whisper warnings in empty corridors.

Someone in this house knew the truth about my family's fall. Someone wanted me to know it too.

A floorboard creaked just outside my door.

I froze, the photograph still clutched in my hand, my heart slamming hard against my ribs. I shoved the locket beneath my pillow and rose slowly from the bed, every instinct screaming at me to stay silent.

The doorknob began to turn.

I reached for the heavy candle holder on my nightstand, gripping it tight enough that my knuckles ached, my eyes fixed on the door as it inched open, the hallway beyond swallowed in shadow.

Someone was coming in.