I entered my room, flopped down on my bed and stared at the ceiling, and as my heart raced, I pictured Jace in the forefront of my mind, and I started to become far more annoyed at myself than him. It was my fault. I was the one who’d gone along with it—I could’ve just said ‘no’ to the whole Ouija game idea, but instead I’d basically walked right into Jace’s prank. Besides, he’d given me the chance to back out, and I’d said no because I wanted to impress him. It was just a silly prank, and I’d massively overreacted by storming out.
As I pictured his bright blue eyes, hungry gaze and powerful arms, my anger toward him melted away, and the true underlying reason for the storm of emotions I was feeling become abundantly clear.
Whatever I felt for Jace, it was more than just a silly little crush.
I was actually falling for him.
Chapter 13
Jace
Shit. That wasn’t what I’d intended to happen at all. I thought Rayna would find my little prank funny, but now that I was actually thinking about it, it wasn’t that funny. She probably thought I’d been faking the friendship with her just so I could tell her to ‘blow me’ in an elaborate way, but that hadn’t been it at all. My true intention had been to make her feel better about living in the manor. Judging by the questions she’d been asking my Dad at breakfast the other morning, she obviously still thought there was something creepy about the place, so I’d figured that if I could show her just how silly all the supposedly ‘supernatural’ stuff in the world was, she’d realize there were no ghosts or anything in the manor, and she’d feel more capable of settling in properly.
Well, it had majorly backfired on me, and now I looked like a fucking asshole.
I headed up the stairs, desperate to make it better before she decided to go another few weeks of zero contact with me. We’d only just gotten over the hideous awkwardness of our second failed hookup, so the last thing I’d needed to do was fuck things up again…and yet I had. In all of my excitement to have fun with Rayna and stop her from being afraid of the house, I hadn’t noticed just how afraid she truly was.
I burst into Rayna’s bedroom, quickly spotting her lying flat on her bed. Her face was a little scrunched up but her eyes were closed, so I wasn’t sure whether she was crying or not, and the idea that she might be made me feel about a million times worse.
“Rayna, I’m sorry. I really didn’t mean to upset you.”
“Don’t worry about it. It’s okay,” she muttered, almost under her breath.
Her tone was flat, showing me just how upset she really was. At least she was a little calmer, though. Downstairs a moment ago, she’d been like a hurricane of rage.
“No, no it isn’t.” I sat down next to her on the bed. “I just wanted to make light of a crappy situation. I thought you might still be a bit freaked out about the house and I wanted to make you laugh. I shouldn’t have done that. I’m fucking terrible at making jokes. I think I proved that with the panty incident when you first arrived.”
She looked up at me, her expression starting to soften. “No, really, Jace. It’s fine. I overreacted.”
A slow smile spread across my face as the surprise sank in. I couldn’t believe it; she was actually conceding to me. On the other hand, while I was glad that she was happier, it somehow didn’t feel quite right. There was a heavy feeling in my stomach, as if my subconscious had detected that there was something more to the story than whatever Rayna was letting on.
“It was pretty funny,” she added.
She laughed a little, but it was still halfhearted, so I knew I definitely wasn’t one hundred percent forgiven.
“Would a hug make you feel better?” I asked. “I’ll even throw in a free foot massage to make up for being a dumbass.”
She smiled. “Sure.”
I embraced her, knowing full well that there was nothing even remotely sexual about this hug, and she leaned into me. Her body was tense and stiff, so I knew that her heart wasn’t in it, and I thought for a few seconds, wondering what else I could do to make her feel better.
An idea suddenly struck me.
“Hey, you said you saw your ghost near the main third floor stairwell, right?” I asked, pulling away.
She looked at me curiously. “Jace, there was never a ghost. Everyone else is right; I was just sleepwalking. I’m just an idiot for being freaked out.”
I shook my head. “Nah, like I said the other day at breakfast, I think there’s another explanation. Remember how Dad said it’s possible an intruder got in? I was just thinking, if there was an actual intruder of some kind here, maybe she ran upstairs to hide after she saw you. Why don’t we go and take a look and see if there’s any footprints? Remember, he said there’s tons of dust up there because of all the renovations, so even though it was a few weeks ago, if the woman you saw in the hallway ran up there, we’ll know.”
“But your Dad said that the fourth floor was out of bounds, didn’t he?”
I stood up, holding out my hand to her. “As long as we’re careful, we’ll be fine. The worst thing that can happen is we’ll get a little dirty from all the dust.”
I wouldn’t have minded getting dirty with her in other ways, but now was definitely not the time to be cracking sleazy jokes, considering how my sleazy Ouija prank had turned out.
She nodded, obviously intrigued by my idea. “Okay, let’s do it,” she said, taking my hand and letting me help her up. “But even if there was an intruder, wouldn’t they have run downstairs, not up? You know, to get out of the place before being caught.”
“Yeah, but maybe not. Worth a shot to take a look anyway,” I replied smoothly.
She was right; I didn’t actually think we were going to find anything up there on the fourth floor, but if it made her feel better to explore the place and see that nothing was out of the ordinary, then I would do it happily.
As we walked up the stairs, I tried to remember what the exact layout had been up here before the renovations had started. It’d been such a long time since I’d ventured up to the fourth floor that it was difficult to think.
“What’s actually up there?” Rayna asked. “Just more bedrooms?”
“Yeah, mostly just another load of guest bedrooms, but there was also a sort of play area. I think it used to be a sitting room of some sort, but when my parents were still together, it was like my little kid’s retreat. While Dad was at work and the staff were cleaning everything downstairs, I’d hang out up here and read or play with Mom.”
“That’s cute. What’s it all being renovated for?”
“I think Dad’s having it renovated so that the guest rooms are all bigger with their own bathrooms. Kinda like what we have in our rooms on the third floor.”
“Oh, cool. Any particular reason why?”
I shrugged. “Because he can, I guess. It’s not like this bloody place doesn’t already have enough rooms.”
I coughed from all the dust as we finally reached the top of the stairs, and I glanced around, spotting an old bookshelf in the hall which must’ve been moved by the team who’d been up here starting on the renovations. The sight of the old shelf sent my mind whizzing back to a time I’d assumed was long gone. I remembered how that very shelf had sat in my play area, filled with books, and when we were up here, Mom would sit on the sofa and read to me.
We’d been so happy then, like a real family. Thinking back to that, it was difficult to remember how or why it had all gone so terribly wrong.
“Oh shit, Jace. Look!”
I turned to see Rayna pointing towards the ground, and I followed her gaze to see a set of footprints in the thick dust that overlaid the wooden floorboards.
“That’s probably just from the workers before they left,” I said. “Either that or Dad.”
On closer inspection, I could see I was wrong about that. These footprints had been made with bare feet, and they weren’t men’s at all. They were small and delicate; they had definitely come from a woman. They also didn’t look co
mpletely fresh; they had a thin coating of dust on them, meaning they’d probably been there for a few weeks.
Jesus…
Rayna hadn’t been sleepwalking after all. Someone had actually been in the house that night; at least that’s what it looked like.
My mind spun around, trying to figure out what the hell all of this meant. Who the hell would break into our house at two in the morning, only to take nothing at all? Could my Dad’s theory be correct—could some drunk woman have somehow wandered onto the property and made her way inside the manor, only to run and hide when she encountered Rayna in the hall? Or was it something more sinister? I’d once heard a nightmarish story of a woman who had somehow attracted a crazed stalker, and the stalker had ended up living in her house for months and hiding out in the attic, only coming out at night to watch her as she slept. She’d discovered the horrifying truth after putting a nanny cam in her room to keep an eye on things around the house when she’d noticed food and other miscellaneous items had been mysteriously vanishing.
I leaned in closer to get a better look at the prints, my heart thumping wildly at the same time. If there was some sort of insane stalker coming in and out of the manor—or worse, living here and hiding out in nooks and crannies—then I wanted to protect Rayna.
“Look,” I said, pointing at the trail of footprints. “They go right along the hall. I should follow them to make sure there isn’t someone still up here somehow. But let’s get you back downstairs first.”
“I don’t know,” she replied hesitantly. “I think I should come with you.”
“You sure?”
She nodded. “Yeah. I feel safe with you.”
My heart swelled at her words. I’d never thought I’d hear those sentiments from a girl, and I definitely never thought it’d feel so great to hear.
“All right. Come on.”
We tiptoed alongside the prints, not wanting to tread on them in case we wanted to show anyone later—Dad, Elena or the police if necessary. We were also careful to make as little sound as possible, and I was so busy focusing on the task at hand that I didn’t notice any of our surroundings until Rayna forced me to.
“Who’s that?” she whispered, pointing to a framed photo on the wall.
It was a picture of the whole family—Mom, Dad and me when I was a child. It had always hung here on the wall in the fourth floor hallway, and Dad must’ve just left it here to gather dust when he’d begun the renovations.
“That’s me, back when I was cute,” I said with a grin, trying to distract Rayna from the image of my mother. I figured that seeing relics from one of Dad’s relationship from so long ago might make her feel uneasy for her own mother’s sake, and I didn’t want that to be her problem.
“And your Mom?” she said, not missing a beat as usual.
I sighed. “Yeah.”
“It looks like your Mom liked books too.” Rayna indicated to a massive stack of novels that had been callously discarded under a pile of rubble from where the work team had knocked out one of the guest bedroom walls. “While we’re here, you should have a quick look and see if there are any you want to keep.”
“Yeah, good idea. Do you think it’s weird that my father’s just letting this stuff sit here, and not getting rid of it properly?”
“Well, you know him better than I do. Do you think it’s weird?” she asked. She purposely avoided eye contact with me and started to shuffle through the pile of books. “Do you think she was the love of his life, and he’s never gotten over her or something?”
I joined her on the floor. “I don’t know. I wouldn’t think so, because their relationship ended so badly, but maybe he went on to realize his mistake. Or maybe he just misses having that whole family unit. I don’t know. Maybe that’s why he’s been so nice to me since I got back. He never used to be like that with me, you know. Almost always ignored me, never gave a fuck what I did unless I was somehow embarrassing him.”
“Sorry. I didn’t know he was like that in the past. But maybe my Mom is the one to finally help him move on and want to be a real family man,” she replied.
Her tone sounded as uneasy as I felt. I couldn’t exactly reassure her that Elena was the one, because until recently, I’d always assumed that my Dad didn’t have a ‘one’. I’d just thought that even when he was in his eighties, he’d still be running around with much younger women—women pumped full of Botox and silicone. Then again, Elena wasn’t like that. Just like Rayna, she was a natural beauty, and she was friendly and smart.
“Yeah, maybe. I don’t know,” I finally said.
“Maybe you’re onto something with the family unit thing. Like you said, he seems to be making more of an effort with you now.”
“Yeah.”
That was definitely true, but then again, he still hadn’t asked me anything about my return to London. Perhaps he’d spoken to my Mom and knew exactly what I’d done in Edinburgh, and he simply thought it was too awful to discuss and chose to sweep it under the rug instead.
“Oh, check this out!” I said a moment later, grabbing a particularly old-looking book of stories from the pile. “Mom used to read this to me when I was little. It belonged to her when she was a child too.”
“Take it. It’s yours, after all.” Rayna smiled, and I tucked the book under my arm, just as we heard a loud banging sound echoing through the hall.
“Oh, shit. What the hell was that?” Rayna asked, her eyes wide. Her knuckles turned white as they gripped another book she’d picked up, and I saw her legs tensing, like she was getting ready to run.
“I’m sure it was just something falling down,” I said.
“I don’t know, Jace. Let’s get out of here,” she said. Her voice had turned shrill.
I nodded, knowing she was truly scared right now. “Okay, let’s go.”
She turned and bolted back down the hall and then the stairs, with me only a few steps behind her. She didn’t stop running until we reached the main dining room all the way down on the first floor, and we almost bumped right into our parents who had apparently just returned from the hotel they’d stayed at the night before, after the wedding reception. The echoing bang we’d heard a minute ago must’ve just been from the front door slamming behind them when they came inside.
“Did you guys seriously miss us that much?” Elena said with a cheeky smile as she noticed Rayna trying to catch her breath. “We were only gone for one night; you didn’t need to run all the way down here!”
Before we could respond, Dad spotted the book tucked under my arm and gave me a sharp look. “Where the hell have you two been?”
“On the fourth floor.”
He sighed and ran a hand through his thinning hair in exasperation. “I thought I told you two not to go up there. There’s still piles of rubble from where the workers knocked out some walls. You could trip over or something.”
“We’re not idiots, Dad, and we have eyes. We could see the piles and walk around them with these new inventions called legs.”
He narrowed his eyes. “Don’t get smart with me, son. What were you doing up there, anyway?”
“Well, I remembered Rayna saying how she thought she saw that woman near the stairwell, and you said you thought it could be an intruder. So I figured if there really was one here that night, then maybe they ran up there to hide when Rayna came out. That’d mean there’d be footprints in all the dust up there. And guess what?”
I paused, and Elena flashed me a curious look. “What?”
“There are footprints up there, and they don’t look brand new—more like they’ve been there a few weeks, which is when Rayna saw someone. And they’re not from you or the renovation workers, either. Too small. It’s either a child or a woman, and considering Rayna told you she saw a woman, I think it’s safe to assume it was. So there really was an intruder that night. We should call the police.”
Dad affected a bored expression. “Jace, I’m glad to see you and Rayna getting along so well now, but you’r
e behaving like overly-excited children. There’s been no one in this house except for us and the staff, and I can assure you of that. We don’t need to contact the police.”
“But—“
He held up a hand. “No buts. I’ve already spoken to security like I said I would. They’ve examined all of the CCTV footage from the entirety of the last six months and they saw no one enter the property other than those who were invited or those who work here.”
“So how do you explain what Rayna saw, then? The footprints are there. We can prove it.”
“Rayna was obviously just sleepwalking and having a bad dream that night. As for the prints, perhaps one of the maids wandered up there recently.”
“Without shoes?”
He waved his hand. “Who knows how the bloody maids act when we aren’t around? You can’t trust working class people to follow instructions and act with dignity all the time, can you?”
Elena and Rayna exchanged glances at that, and I almost wanted to smugly tell them, I told you so. He’s an arrogant asshole.
“Seriously?” I said scornfully. “Christ, Dad.”
He rubbed his eyes. “Sorry. I’m just tired from all the wedding festivities yesterday,” he said before turning to his brand new wife. “Elena, darling, I didn’t mean that.”
She took his hand and squeezed it, and I suppressed the urge to roll my eyes. “It’s okay, I understand,” she said quietly, though I could still tell that he’d struck a nerve with his elitist comments.
Dad turned back to me and Rayna. “I don’t want to tell you again. There are no ghosts in this house; only two very silly young adults.”
With that, he stalked out of the room, and Elena followed closely behind him. I glanced over at Rayna, wondering if she was thinking the same thing that I was. Dad had made way too big of a deal about this whole thing, and it was strange how vehemently he was denying that there’d been any intruders in the place when someone obviously had been up on the fourth floor within the last few weeks.
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