For a stretched, impossible moment, no one moved.

The voice floated up from the stairwell again—thin, wavering, echoing strangely against stone.

“Please… is someone there?”

Masha grabbed Georgie’s sleeve with ice-cold fingers. Riggs instinctively put an arm in front of her, as if he could physically block whatever was about to climb out from the dark.

Pauline pressed a trembling hand to her mouth.
She knew that voice.
She had heard it—on witness tapes, old police interviews, recordings stored in dusty archives.

Josie Yates had been dead for thirty-eight years.

Don stepped to the threshold, torch already in hand. His voice, when he spoke, was deep and steady, but every muscle in him was tight as piano wire.

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