Brooke Beretta ❲HOT❳

October 31, 1892

Brooke reached into her tool belt—the same one she'd worn the day she arrived—and pulled out a small, leather-bound book. Evelyn Ashworth's journal, or what was left of it. The pages had been cut down to a single sheet, on which Brooke had written something in her own careful hand.

Silas believes the house will open a door to something he calls the "True World"—a place of pure potential, where thought becomes matter and matter becomes thought. The Order believes that if they can open the door and step through, they will become like gods. brooke beretta

The man who had called himself Julian Cross smiled. It was the same smile Brooke had seen on the carved faces, too wide and full of too many teeth. "Clever girl. But if the house is dead, then I'm free. Truly free. And I've had a hundred years to think about what I want to do."

She set up her temporary living quarters in what had once been the butler's pantry—small, windowless, and defensible. Then she began her walkthrough. October 31, 1892 Brooke reached into her tool

She played the voicemail.

The first page was dated October 31, 1892. The handwriting was elegant, feminine, and increasingly frantic. Silas believes the house will open a door

That, more than anything, made her say yes. The Ashworth House sat at the crest of a hill, hidden behind a grove of old-growth firs that had somehow survived the city's expansion. The neighborhood around it had long since been carved into smaller lots, filled with Craftsman bungalows and faux-Tudor revivals, but the Ashworth property remained stubbornly intact—three acres of overgrown gardens, a crumbling carriage house, and the mansion itself, a sprawling Victorian Gothic nightmare of turrets, gables, and peeling lavender paint.