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These barriers don’t just prevent people from accessing the mansions that stand proudly beyond the seemingly endless, perfectly manicured lawns and opulent gardens along the coastline.

They serve a darker, more wicked purpose—to retain what lies within.

All the lies, sins, and secrets of those who have occupied their hallowed halls for generations are ensconced behind a veneer of delicately scented wisteria.

For most, they offered necessary protection.

But for me, these walls were a prison.

Whitley Manor was my Alcatraz—the place I thought I could never escape.

Once I did, I certainly never thought I would willingly return to Cape Blackwell.

The day Father sent me away to boarding school at fourteen, it felt like having my cell doors thrown open, as if I’d been given a rowboat and tossed into the churning waters to fend for myself, but at least it was freedom.

I didn’t even look back when the gates clanged closed behind the limo he’d put me in. There wasn’t any reason to. The man who sired me wasn’t standing in front of the huge double front doors watching and waving with a tear in his eye, the way most parents would have been when watching their only child leave the only home they’d ever known to experience the world outside the insulated life they had created.

He barely grunted an acknowledgement at me when I told him I was fully packed and leaving. His eyes never left whatever he was reading at his desk in his study. It was as if he had already forgotten. As if I didn’t exist anymore and my parting words were akin to the buzzing of a gnat in his ear when he was trying to concentrate.

Marcelus Whitley couldn’t wait to get rid of me…and I couldn’t wait to escape from those prison walls and him.

Yet, here I am, turning into the drive that’s still so familiar even after this time, staring up at the looming iron gates that closed behind me so definitively twenty years ago.

They haven’t changed. Nor has the feeling that hits me knowing what lies beyond them. The same sense of foreboding shivers through my spine, and I tighten my grip on the wheel in a vain attempt to ground myself in the here and now rather than getting lost in old memories.

He isn’t here anymore.

I’ve been reminding myself of that the entire drive up from Boston. Trying to tamp down the panic that the thought of going home has always brought with it. Struggling with knowing what waits for me here.

He’s gone, Lorelei.

Get a grip.

Taking a deep breath, I roll down my window and type in the code on the panel beside the speaker. All this time, and the old man never bothered to change it.

Unlike the last time I was here, and they closed on a chapter of my life I would rather forget, the gates creak open in welcome now, revealing the long, tree-lined drive that leads to Whitley Manor.

Thick tree trunks and heavy foliage offer only peeks of the colossal mansion looming in the waning daylight until I finally break free of the canopy and can see it in all its glory.

My eyes automatically dart up and to the far left, to the window of the room I spent my entire childhood in, where I used to press my face against the glass and try to see beyond the high walls—a glimpse of freedom from the prison Father created for me.

I’ve tried not to think of it that way on this drive because I need this house for what it was intended to be when my several-times-great-grandfather built it two centuries ago.

A refuge.

A safe haven.

A place where nothing and no one could touch a Whitley within its walls.

That’s what I desperately seek now. Somewhere I can’t be seen. Somewhere I can’t be reached. Somewhere I can’t be found. Somewhere I can hide.

This would have been my last choice. It wasn’t even on my list of possibilities until that phone call from Father’s lawyer’s office telling me he had died.

Marcelus Whitley’s death changed everything.

The Manor and all the skeletons inside it are now mine…

Swallowing back the bile burning my throat, I approach the dark house slowly, the ghosts of my childhood already banging at the door of the vault I’ve tried to lock them away in all these years.