Aurora’s Verdict

CHAPTER FOUR: THE CELLAR

The door exploded inward.

Wood splintered. Cold and darkness vomited into the cabin. A silhouette filled the frame—backlit by vehicle headlights, featureless, inevitable.

Stella ran.

Not toward escape, but deeper into the trap. The back room. The trapdoor. The iron ring her fingers found in the dark. She hauled it open—a maw of colder dark below—and dropped into the earth just as heavy boots crossed the threshold behind her.

The latch clicked shut.

Silence. Then, through wood:

“Where is she?” A man’s voice, Icelandic, gravel and threat.

Hunter’s answer, calm as a blade resting on a throat: “You’re in the wrong story.”

The violence that followed was not the chaos of a fight, but the terrible efficiency of dismantling. Crunches. Thuds. A choked-off gasp. Stella pressed her back against cold stone and understood: Hunter had been waiting for this. Not just expecting it. Hungering for it.

The journal was exactly where he said it would be. Under the red shelf. A leather-bound thing, swollen with damp, smelling of peat and regret.

She opened it to the marked page. Her father’s handwriting—usually so measured, so academic—was a frantic scrawl:

Li Xia is gone.

The baby is alive.

I named her Freya. I buried her mother. I gave her away.

Lin knows. God help us all, Lin knows.

The words blurred. Stella’s hands trembled, the paper whispering like dry leaves. She turned the page. A pressed flower fell out—Arctic poppy, white, delicate. A date beneath it: September 23, 1995.

Then, another entry, years later, the ink a darker, angrier black:

The first body was found today. A girl. Eight years old. Drowned in the Thames. Police called it an accident.

She had my eyes.

Lin served chamomile tea while the news played. She didn’t look away from the screen. “Some things,” she said, stirring her spoon in slow, perfect circles, “must be pruned so the rose can bloom.”

I understood then. The pruning had begun.

Stella’s breath stopped. The air in the cellar thickened, turned syrupy. She couldn’t pull enough of it into her lungs.

Page after page. A ledger of absences.

1998. A fever in Beijing. “Tragic,” said the report. The child was four.

2003. A hiking accident in Scotland. Age twelve.

2009. A car crash outside Vancouver. Seventeen.

2015. An overdose in London. Twenty.

All girls. All with a certain bone structure noted in her father’s hand. All eliminated with the clean, surgical precision of a gardener removing weeds.

The last entry was dated three weeks before his death:

She has a list. I’ve seen it. Twenty-eight names. Freya’s is at the top, underlined. Then the others. My daughters. My sins.

Stella’s name is not on it. Of course not. Stella is the rose.

I am flying to Iceland tomorrow. Not for research. For redemption. Or perhaps just to look upon the land where I buried the only woman I ever truly loved, before I bury myself.

Forgive me, Stella. Forgive me for making you the masterpiece in a gallery of ghosts.

The velvet box held a lock of fine, black hair, tied with a faded ribbon. The medical envelope contained not just a birth certificate, but a death certificate issued three days later for “Female Infant, Li.” And below it, an adoption record so heavily redacted it was mostly black ink, except for a single, typed line:

Subject relocated. Case closed by order of L.Y.

L.Y. Lin Yawen.

Above, the violence ended.

A final, wet crunch. Then silence.

The kind of silence that has weight. That settles in the marrow.

The trapdoor opened. Light fell in a guilty column.

Hunter stood above her, his face a mask of blood and grim triumph. A cut split his brow. His right hand hung at an odd angle—broken or dislocated. But in his left, he held a hunting knife, its blade dark.

“He won’t be needing this,” Hunter said, his voice hoarse. He wiped the blade on his thigh. “Or his lungs. Or his heart.”

Stella stared at him, the journal open in her lap, the truth like a live wire dropped into water, sizzling through her nervous system.

“How many?” she whispered.

Hunter’s eyes—those pale, glacial eyes—met hers. He knew what she was asking. Not about the man he’d just killed. About the ledger in her hands.

“All of them,” he said, the words simple and absolute. “Every one she could find. My aunt’s daughter was the first target. The only one who got away.” He paused. “Maybe.”

He reached down. “The journal. Now.”

She handed it up. He didn’t look at it, just shoved it into his pack.

“My mother…” Stella began, but the sentence had no end.

“Is a curator,” Hunter finished, his voice devoid of judgment. It was a statement of fact. “She collects perfection. And she destroys anything that doesn’t match the collection.” He hauled her out of the cellar. “Including, I suspect, anyone who tries to expose it.”

The cabin was a charnel house. The man near the door wasn’t just dead; he was unmade. Hunter hadn’t fought him. He had dissected him.

Hunter saw her looking. “He was going to kill you. Slowly. He had tools in his kit. Pliers. Wire. Things for making people talk, then making them stop.” He picked up a tactical backpack that wasn’t his. “This is ours now.”

“Where do we go?” Her voice sounded distant, like it belonged to someone else.

“To find the one who got away.” Hunter handed her a parka stiff with someone else’s dried sweat. “Your sister. Freya.”

The word hung between them—a secret, a ghost, a lifeline.

“What if she doesn’t want to be found?”

Hunter’s smile was a thin, cruel s***h. “Then she’s smarter than both of us.” He nodded toward the back door. “But I don’t think she’s hiding. I think she’s waiting. And I think she just sent us an invitation.”

He held up a phone—not his, not Stella’s. The dead man’s. On the screen, a single text message, received ten minutes prior:

Sender: Unknown

Message: The birch tree behind the summer cabin. Dig. Then follow the lights.

Hunter met Stella’s eyes. “The summer cabin. Where your father buried Li Xia. Where Freya was born.”

He opened the back door. The blizzard screamed, a white wall of oblivion.

“Your mother has a list of twenty-eight,” he said, his voice almost lost in the wind. “But she missed one. And that one isn’t hiding. She’s hunting.”

He stepped out into the white.

Stella followed, not because she had hope, but because the truth was now behind her, in a journal filled with dead girls’ names, and the only thing worse than walking into the storm was staying in the quiet with the ghosts.

The door swung shut.

Inside the cabin, on the floor, the dead man’s phone buzzed once more.

A new message flashed on the locked screen:

Welcome to the garden, little rose. Did you like what you found in the dirt?