The Billionaire secret mate

Chapter7

Nora couldn't breathe because she had heard the words so clearly, your mother is waiting, and it wasn't even the words themselves that frightened her most. It was the voice. She knew that voice. There was something about it that reached into a place inside her she hadn't visited in years, something buried beneath old memories and pain, and before her mind could make sense of what was happening, her heart had already recognized it. It sounded like her mother. For one impossible moment, hope rose inside her, sudden and fragile, almost painful in its intensity. Maybe her mother wasn't dead. Maybe everything she had believed all these years had been a lie. Maybe there had been a reason for her disappearance, a reason no one had ever bothered to explain, and maybe this strange mountain, this ancient mansion, and the people who looked at Nora as though they had known her long before she arrived were somehow connected to it all. Maybe her mother had been here, waiting for her all this time.

Then reality began to settle in again, and the hope that had barely touched her heart was replaced by something colder. Everything around her felt wrong. The mansion had gone completely silent, not the peaceful kind of silence that came with an empty room, but the kind that made Nora feel as though the entire house was listening. The words she had heard seemed to crawl through the room and beneath her skin, repeating themselves inside her head until she couldn't tell whether she was remembering them or still hearing them. Kieran hadn't said a word. He stood beside her, staring at the darkness beneath the broken floor, his expression impossible to read, but Nora noticed the way his eyes moved, the way he seemed to be watching everything at once. He looked perturbed, almost disturbed, and that frightened her because Kieran had been calm through everything. The rain, the journey, the strange people at the gate, the mansion itself, none of it had shaken him the way this voice had.

Nora turned toward him, her heart pounding as she tried to hold herself together. “What is underneath the ground, Kieran? I heard a voice, and I know what I heard. Don't tell me I imagined it because I didn't. It sounded like my mother, and I need answers.” Kieran remained quiet, and that silence only made the anger building inside Nora stronger. “Everybody here seems to know me,” she continued, her voice trembling now as everything she had been holding back finally began to come out. “They look at me like they know exactly who I am. The men at the gate recognized me. Everyone in this house keeps looking at me like I've come back to a place I should already know, and yet I'm the only person who doesn't understand anything. I don't know what this place is, I don't know why you brought me here, I don't know what is happening to me, and now something underneath this mansion is calling me a Resonant. What is a Resonant, Kieran? Why does everyone know something about me that I don't?”

She could see that he was trying to decide what to say, and somehow that made everything worse. It felt like he had been protecting her from the truth from the moment they met, always giving her just enough information to keep her moving but never enough to understand where she was going. Nora stepped closer to him, tears beginning to gather in her eyes as she asked the question that had been sitting inside her since the beginning. “Who am I, Kieran? Who am I?”