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Szolsvár Castle, Gemenc Forest, Hungary

The attic was exactly as his son had left it. A narrow bed was pushed into the corner, the walls cobwebbed and stained with damp. A wooden table housed a heap of dusty books. Words were crudely scratched into its surface—terrible, heartbreaking words.

Voldan Cane read them. Misery swam in his throat.

He had not meant to come into the attic. The space had been out of bounds since Grigori’s violent death, and Voldan knew to access it again would only spell fresh angst. Regret swilled in his stomach, bitter and black. He felt so alone.

Grigori, my darling son … Why did you do it?

‘Mr Cane?’ came a fearful enquiry from the bottom of the attic stairs. Janika. Her English was poor and so they conversed in Hungarian. ‘Are you all right?’

Voldan cawed his response, a monotone bleat: ‘Leave me alone.’

Unfortunate that it should come out that way, like a robot, with no more or less feeling than if he were reciting a shopping list—but the point was made. Voldan no longer bothered with pleasantries. Janika got paid, didn’t she? And if she ever decided she’d had enough and went to tip him down the staircase, well fine, he would welcome it. Things could get no worse.

He heard her scurry off down the hallway.

Oh, my son … Voldan wheeled himself across the desolate attic room. He hadn’t counted on this compulsion to revisit Grigori’s bedroom. It was a need to be close to his boy again, to inhabit the air he had breathed, to embrace the view he had seen, and always, above all, to seek the reasons behind the tragedy.

The reasons …

Grigori Cane had been a sweet failure, a weakling and a misfit from the day he was born. They had known it when they’d first held Grigori away from the womb, a screaming, wrinkled infant not two minutes old, and his dark eyes portals to a soul far older than they knew. Voldan had done everything in his power to integrate his child with normal youngsters, to give him a normal life. But Grigori had not been normal. He had been special. Shy and reclusive, with a debilitating allergy to sunlight and a stammer that made him a mockery, he had been helpless against a lifetime of taunts and rejections. The son of a tycoon, he should have had everything. He should have flourished. Instead he had carried the weight of his battered soul like a cross.

Perhaps his demise had been imminent.

Perhaps nothing could have stopped it.

It had been no easy feat getting up to the attic, in Voldan’s decrepit state. Janika had lifted him, her solid Hungarian haunches straining under his load. The castle was vast, Voldan and his faithful maid the only inhabitants, and his recent consignment to a wheelchair worsened matters. Janika had deposited him on Grigori’s bed while she brought the chair up—frailty an unwelcome admission for a man who had once been head of a worldwide banking corporation. Once, Janika had suggested he sell and move to a more manageable place. Unimaginable. Leave Szolsvár Castle, the home that had been in his family for generations? Leave the place where his wife had given him his only son, and in doing so had perished in childbirth? Leave the place where, twenty years later, Grigori had flung himself from the Great Hall mezzanine and splatted to his death? The ghosts here needed him. He needed them.

They were all he had left. His family.

After all, it was Voldan’s own fault he was in this state. After Grigori died, there had been nothing to live for. His purpose had evaporated. His heart had ripped. He had attempted to follow in his son’s footsteps and the results had been disastrous.

Deformed like a monster. Paralysed like a corpse.

And now he was trapped in this devil-sent machine, left with the use of only the thumb on his right hand. He was unable to speak save for a croaking voice box.

From the turret Voldan could see woodland, a blanket of green that stretched to the horizon. Grigori had returned here during the last few months of his life, scarcely leaving his room, refusing to eat or drink or accept visitors.

‘I am a failure, Father,’ was all he would say. ‘I do not deserve to live.’

Voldan’s thumb twitched on the arm of his wheelchair. When he thought of his son he was filled to the brim with a restless injustice. He had been robbed.

Turning to go, he almost didn’t see it. From darkness, a glimmer of light …

Voldan looked, and looked again.

If the wheelchair hadn’t become stuck in the groove between two floorboards, he might never have found it. ‘Janika!’ he yelled—at least it felt like a yell, even if it did come out in that wretched, miserable, bionic drone. ‘Janika!’

‘I am here, Mr Cane!’ The maid came rushing up the stairs. She was middle-aged, with a frizz of mouse-brown hair, a flaccid chin and a sagging bosom. Seeing him stranded lopsided in the furrow, she hurried over, flapping her arms like the wings on a nesting turkey. ‘Oh, Mr Cane,’ she cooed, righting him. ‘What happened?’

The floorboard was loose. Voldan felt it give beneath the wheel. That was what had caught him. The monotone was back:

‘There is something under the floor,’ he said, the words betraying none of his excitement. He had thought he knew every inch of his son’s domain, but no, here was more. Something Grigori had tucked away, kept to himself, a parting secret.

Something he had wished his father to find.

Janika removed the floorboard with a sturdy grunt. Inside was a wooden box.

‘Lift it,’ Voldan demanded. Janika did as she was told. ‘Open it.’

Darkness fell across the turret window. Clouds brooded and in the distance came the first rumble of thunder. The lid prised open.

Janika tilted the box so that Voldan could see its contents.

He didn’t understand. ‘Who are they?’

Janika removed one of the photographs. It was a picture of a woman. Across her face was streaked a giant red cross. The red was smeared, turning to brown.

Blood?

The maid extracted another. This one was a boy. It bore the same red mark.

Angela Silvers and Kevin Chase. What had they to do with his son?

‘The rest,’ instructed Voldan electronically. ‘Empty the rest.’

There were five more: seven in total.

Journalist Eve Harley … Model Tawny Lascelles … Investor Jacob Lyle … Senator Mitch Corrigan … and Celeste Cavalieri, the jeweller.

All defaced by that same blood cross: the mark of Grigori’s plague.

‘What is this, Mr Cane?’ Janika whispered.

Voldan’s eyes hardened. On the back of each photograph was scrawled a single word. BITCH. LIAR. THIEF. FRAUD.

‘I don’t know,’ he replied, already tasting on the tip of his tongue the sweet, sticky nectar of revenge. ‘But I intend to find out.’