One of them had been hidden beneath my grandmother’s mattress.
One had been burned around the edges.
And one had been placed inside her coffin.
“Hello, Vivian,” the dead man said.
My fingers tightened against the edge of the counter.
Julian glanced between us. “Who the hell are you?”
The man stepped inside and closed the door behind him.
“My name is Adrian Vale.”
The ceramic mug slipped from Elena’s fingers.
It shattered across the floor.
Beatrice turned white.
Not pale.
White.
Her lips trembled as she stared at him, her smugness stripped away so completely that she looked twenty years older.
“No,” she whispered. “You’re dead.”
Adrian’s gaze moved to her.
“That was the arrangement, Beatrice.”
Silence swallowed the room.
I had imagined this moment since I was sixteen years old, since the night I discovered the first photograph and demanded answers from my grandmother. She had refused to tell me anything except one sentence.
