The dead don't lie. But the living? The living wear masks.
Damien Voss had spent ten years believing a lie.
Ten years mourning a death that was never what it seemed.
They said his mother died of illness.
They said it with sympathetic eyes, soft voices, hushed tones like it was mercy.
But mercy doesn't come wrapped in secrecy.
And tonight… the truth had finally carved itself into Damien's bones—hot, hollow, and unforgivable.
She didn't die from illness.
She was silenced.
And someone made sure her story stayed buried right beside her.
The Voss estate stood like a monument to generational wealth—cold, untouchable, pristine. It hadn't changed. Not the hedges trimmed with mathematical precision. Not the iron gates or the marble columns. Not even the lies carved beneath its foundation.
But tonight, something had changed.
Damien was home.
And he wasn't the boy they cast out. He wasn't the discarded heir anymore.
He was something else now.
Something dangerous.
The guards outside the mansion were alert, armed, and utterly useless. They were trained to protect the family from threats outside the gates.
But the rot?
The real poison?
It lived inside the walls.
Damien moved like a phantom, slipping past the old security system like it was second nature. Because once, it was. He had played hide-and-seek through these halls as a child. Now he stalked them as a man looking for blood.
He paused at the double doors of his father's study—oak, engraved, and heavy with memories. It had always been forbidden ground. His father's inner sanctum. The place where decisions were made, legacies altered, and people erased.
He pushed it open.
Dust motes danced in the moonlight as he stepped in.
It was exactly as he remembered. The smell of leather-bound books. The soft tick of the antique grandfather clock. The decanter of untouched scotch that had sat on the shelf for decades—never drunk, just displayed, like everything else in this house.
Untouched. Unchanged.
Except for one thing.
She was gone.
Her presence. Her scent. Her warmth.
It was like she had never existed.
Damien moved behind the desk, his hand brushing over the polished surface. He opened drawers with surgical precision, rifling through old ledgers, reports, and personal notes. Contracts. Power plays. Nothing human. Just paper trails and profit.
Then he found it.
In the last drawer, beneath a false bottom. Hidden.
A document—aged, folded, trembling at the edges from time.
His breath caught as he unfolded it.
A will.
Signed by her hand.
His mother's name at the bottom, the ink slightly smudged—as if written in fear or haste.
The contents made his heart stop.
He was the rightful heir. Not some footnote. Not a bastard left in the cold. The heir.
The legacy his father claimed to protect was never his to begin with.
His father buried the truth.
If he buried this… what else had he buried?
The trail led him to a forgotten part of the city.
No cameras. No noise. No eyes.
A rundown apartment building, walls yellowed by time and secrets. Inside, on the third floor, lived a man the world had long forgotten:
Dr. Henry Whitaker.
Family physician. A quiet man who vanished after his mother's death. Too quiet. Too deliberate.
Now Damien knew why.
He knocked once. Firm. Controlled.
The door creaked open—and the past opened with it.
The doctor's face went white.
"You…" he breathed, like seeing a ghost. "You were supposed to be dead."
Damien tilted his head, voice like ice. "Disappointed?"
Whitaker looked over his shoulder like the walls might have ears. His hands trembled as he let Damien in.
"You shouldn't be here," he whispered. "You don't understand. It's dangerous."
Damien didn't flinch. "So was keeping quiet."
He stepped closer, eyes unblinking.
"She didn't die from illness, did she?"
Silence.
Not denial.
Confirmation.
The doctor's lips parted but no sound came.
Damien pressed. "You know something. I can see it in your face. Tell me. Tell me what he did."
Whitaker's voice broke. "Your father…"
BANG.
A single gunshot shattered the air.
Blood sprayed the wall like a crimson confession.
The doctor's body jerked, then collapsed, mouth frozen mid-sentence. Eyes still open. Still holding the truth.
Damien spun, a knife already in his hand—but the assassin was gone. Just a glimpse—black mask, black clothes, boots sliding through the window like smoke.
He lunged for the fire escape, but the shadows swallowed the figure whole. Gone.
Too fast. Too clean.
They were watching.
They knew he was coming.
They silenced the doctor before the truth could breathe.
Damien stood over Whitaker's body, fists clenched so tightly his knuckles cracked.
This wasn't just a loose end being tied up.
This was a message.
A warning.
A chess move designed to make him pause.
But they had miscalculated.
Because grief wasn't what Damien felt now.
It was something worse.
Clarity.
He knelt beside the corpse, eyes hard, unblinking.
They killed her.
They buried the truth.
And now they were trying to bury the last of it before it could surface.
But they forgot one thing.
You don't stop Damien Voss with fear.
You fuel him.
He rose to his feet like a blade being unsheathed, eyes burning with a promise that didn't need to be spoken.
His voice was a whisper in the dark, but it rang with vengeance.
"I will unearth every secret…"
He stepped toward the door.
"…and I will bury every last one of them."