"I warned you, Kristina," he said, leaning closer to me, his hand scorching my wrist, his silver eyes darkening to a stormy grey. "I told you what would happen if you defied me."
Fire was racing up and down my arm. The rose necklace burned at my thr...
Song: All I Ask of You (Reprise) from the musical the Phantom of the Opera.
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~ Ash ~
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August, 2005
I stared out the attic window.
I had always liked it up here, even before. It was quiet. When I was younger, it was the spot I liked to hide. Though it was dusty and dark, cold and foreboding, cobwebs hanging off of every corner, once I lit a candle, it seemed warm and comforting; a home.
Nobody alive would ever bother me here.
I'd been sitting in a corner, next to the light of a lone candle, jotting down the melodies ringing through my head, when I heard the car crunch its way up the driveway. That was one of the other things I liked about the manor - the gravel driveway alerted you to any unwelcome guests.
And there were a lot of those these days.
The manor had been selling for over a year, ever since the last family disappeared. Vanished, never to be seen again. The mother, the father, and their only child. Gone.
I'd taken the opportunity to make this place my own. Nobody would care if a fourteen-year-old boy lived in an abandoned manor. I'd already found the hidden basement, sealed off from the rest of the word. I'd discovered numerous amounts of passages winding behind the walls of the manor. I stayed there at night, munching on the scraps of food left behind by the real estate agents, falling into a restless sleep. It wasn't enough, though. I was withering away, dying from the inside out. I couldn't survive like this much longer.
This is why I allowed the agents to show the house. To try to convince wealthy families that the manor was not cursed - claiming that the previous family simply moved away, choosing to abandon all connections in the town. No ghosts haunted the halls of this place.
Mostly because they were preoccupied with haunting me.
They were here now, watching me watch the sleek black car come to a stop in front of the house.
