The Billionaire secret mate

Chapter8

For a moment, Kieran said nothing. He looked at her with something almost like sadness before finally admitting, “I knew your mother.” Nora felt her entire body go still. She had spent years with questions about her mother, questions nobody wanted to answer, and now this man was standing in front of her telling her that he had known her. “You knew my mom?” she asked, barely able to keep her voice steady. Kieran nodded, but when Nora demanded to know how, when he had known her, and what he knew about her, he only told her, “That's not the story for today.”

Nora stared at him in disbelief. “Not the story for today? Kieran, what does that even mean? My mother is the reason I'm standing here. Whatever is happening to me has something to do with her, doesn't it?” He didn't answer, and Nora felt the frustration rise again. “You're protecting me,” she whispered, and this time Kieran didn't deny it. “Yes,” he admitted, and the honesty of that answer almost hurt more than another lie would have. “From what?” she asked, but Kieran's eyes moved toward the darkness beneath the floor before returning to her, and Nora already knew she wasn't going to like the answer.

“You don't understand what you're asking for,” he told her.

“I don't care,” Nora replied, shaking her head as the tears finally slipped down her cheeks. “I have spent my entire life being kept away from the truth. I don't want you to protect me anymore. I want to know everything. I want to know why you brought me to this mountain, why this mansion feels like it knows me, why everyone here knows my name, why they call me a Resonant, and why something underneath this house is using my mother's voice.”

Kieran's expression hardened, and when he finally spoke, his voice was quieter than before. “The voice you're hearing isn't your mother.”

Nora stared at him as if he had just spoken another language. “What?”

“It isn't her.”

“But I know that voice,” Nora insisted. “I know my mother's voice. I could recognize it anywhere.”

“I know.”

“Then how can you tell me it isn't her?”

Kieran took a slow breath, and for the first time there was something in his face that looked like regret. “Because your mother is dead.”

The word pierced through Nora.

Dead.

She had known that. She had lived with it for years. She had learned how to carry the emptiness her mother left behind, learned how to survive birthdays without her, learned how to stop expecting her to walk through the door one day and call her name. But hearing that voice moments ago had opened something inside Nora that she thought had been dead too. For one beautiful, impossible moment, she had believed there was a chance. A small piece of hope had appeared in her heart, telling her that maybe her mother was alive, maybe she had been waiting for her somewhere inside this strange mansion, maybe all the pain Nora had carried for years had been based on a lie.

Now Kieran had taken that hope away.

Nora shook her head slowly, refusing to accept it. “No. You don't know that.”

“I do.”

“You could be wrong.”

“I am not.”

“You could be lying to me.”

Kieran looked at her, his expression serious. “I am not lying about this.”

Nora wiped the tears from her face, but more came before she could stop them. “Then why did I hear her? Why did she call my name? Why did she sound exactly like her?”

Kieran's voice softened. “Because whatever is down there knows you. It knows what you remember. It knows what you miss, and it knows that your mother's voice is the one thing you would listen to without questioning it.”

Nora slowly turned toward the darkness beneath the mansion. She wanted to believe him, but some part of her still desperately wanted that voice to be real. She wanted her mother to be alive so badly that even the fear inside her couldn't completely kill the hope.

Then the voice came again.

“Nora.”

Her body froze.

Kieran went completely still beside her.

The voice was soft, familiar, almost loving, and Nora felt tears fill her eyes again because she knew that voice. She knew the warmth behind it, the tenderness she remembered from childhood, the way her mother used to call her when she was afraid.

“Little girl.”

Nora stared into the darkness.

Kieran's hand reached for hers, but neither of them moved.

The voice came one final time, and this time there was something different beneath the softness, something ancient and cold that made the hair on Nora's arms rise.

“Your mother is waiting.”

Nora stared into the darkness beneath the mansion, her heart torn between the part of her that wanted desperately to believe and the part that was beginning to understand something far more terrifying.

Whatever was beneath that house didn't simply know her name.

It knew her memories.

It knew her pain.

It knew exactly what she had lost.

And it knew that if it wore her mother's voice, Nora might be willing to follow it anywhere.