Chapter 15 - The First Night Without LocksThat night, no one slept.
The mansion had too many rooms, too many shadows, too many doors that looked innocent until someone knew better.
Every lock in the east wing was removed before sunset.
Lucian did it himself.
He took a screwdriver and a crowbar from the garage and worked in silence while reporters screamed beyond the gates and lawyers called his phone until it died.
Rosa watched from the hallway.
Mateo watched too.
The boy did not speak, but he counted every lock as it fell.
One.
Two.
Three.
By the seventh, his shoulders lowered slightly.
By the tenth, he let go of Isabella’s hand.
At midnight, the final lock clattered into a metal bucket.
Lucian looked at Mateo.
“All of them.”
Mateo walked forward slowly.
He stared into the blue room.
No one told him to be brave.
No one told him it was only a room.
No one told him to stop making everyone uncomfortable.
Rosa had forbidden it.
“Let him feel what he feels,” she had said, and for once, the house obeyed.
Mateo stepped inside.
His breathing quickened.
Isabella moved to follow, but Rosa touched her arm.
“Wait.”
Mateo crossed the room to the wall of drawings. He studied them one by one. His mother’s handwriting. His own baby face. Years stolen in pencil and pain.
Then he picked up a blue crayon from the table.
Lucian stepped forward.
Mateo raised the crayon to the wall.
For a second, everyone thought he might scribble over the drawings.
Instead, he drew a door.
A big yellow door.
Then he wrote beneath it in uneven letters:
WE GOT OUT.
Isabella covered her mouth.
Lucian looked away.
Rosa cried openly.
Mateo placed the crayon down.
“I don’t want this room hidden.”
Lucian nodded.
“It won’t be.”
“I want people to see it.”
Isabella’s voice trembled.
“Are you sure?”
Mateo nodded.
“So they know I wasn’t lying.”
No one argued.
The next morning, investigators photographed every inch of the room. The drawings became evidence. The scratch marks became evidence. The music box became evidence.
But to Rosa, the most important evidence was not inside any official report.
It was Mateo eating breakfast at the kitchen table for the first time in years.
Not in the formal dining room. Not under Celeste’s cold stare. Not with a tutor correcting his posture.
In the kitchen.
With Rosa making pancakes.
Isabella sitting beside him.
Lucian burning the first batch because he had never cooked anything in his life.
Mateo watched smoke rise from the pan.
Then, unexpectedly, he laughed.
It was small.
Rusty.
But real.
Rosa turned away before anyone saw her wipe her eyes.
The mansion had heard screaming for years.
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That morning, it heard a child laugh.
And the sound frightened the ghosts more than any police siren.
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