The Return of The Forgotten Son

The Aftermath

Victoria's POV 

I didn't know where to go after I left the manor.

My car sat in the driveway, covered in snow. I'd barely driven it in years. The Ashbournes didn't leave the estate much. We kept our sins close, hidden behind iron gates and old money.

I drove without direction. Just away. Away from the house where my brother burned. Away from the bodies in the east wing. Away from Mother sitting on the stairs with her white hair and aged face.

The village was small, unchanged since childhood. The same shops, the same church, the same people who looked at Ashbournes with a mixture of respect and fear. They knew something was wrong with our family. They'd always known.

I stopped at a small hotel on the edge of town. The kind of place with thin walls and weak coffee. The clerk looked at me strangely when I checked in. I must have looked terrible. Hair wild, clothes rumpled, eyes red from crying.

"Just one night?" he asked.

"I don't know yet."

He handed me a key. Room twelve, second floor. I climbed the stairs like an old woman, each step taking effort.

The room was plain. A bed, a chair, a window overlooking the street. I sat on the bed and stared at nothing.

My phone buzzed. Messages from Mother. Dozens of them.

*Where are you?*

*Please come back*

*We need to talk*

*I'm sorry*

*Victoria please*

I turned the phone off.

Outside, the sun set. The sky turned orange, then purple, then black. I didn't move. Didn't eat. I didn't sleep. Just sat and felt the weight of everything that had happened.

Thomas was dead. Father was dead. Whitmore was dead. And Elias had been dead for twenty years before he came back as something else.

I was the only one left. The last Ashbourne.

A knock on the door made me jump. I hadn't ordered food. I hadn't told anyone where I was.

"Who is it?" My voice was hoarse.

"Someone who needs to talk to you."

I opened the door slowly. A woman stood in the hallway. She was older, maybe sixty, with grey hair and kind eyes. She wore a long coat and carried a leather bag.

"I'm sorry to bother you," she said. "My name is Eleanor Whitmore. I was Dr. Whitmore's daughter."

My stomach dropped. "I'm so sorry about your father."

"May I come in?"

I stepped aside. She walked into the room and sat in the chair. I sat back on the bed.

"The police called me yesterday," Eleanor said. "They told me my father died of a heart attack at your family's estate. But when I went to collect his body, I saw something that didn't match their story."

"What did you see?"

"Terror. Absolute terror frozen on his face. That's not how heart attacks look, Miss Ashbourne. That's how people look when they see something that breaks their mind."

I said nothing. What could I say?

Eleanor opened her bag and pulled out a journal. Old, leather-bound, filled with cramped handwriting.

"I found this in my father's study. He'd been keeping it for years. Writing about the things he'd done. The secrets he kept. The guilt that ate at him."

She handed it to me. I opened it to a random page.

*Twenty years since the Ashbourne boy died. Twenty years of lying. I signed that death certificate knowing it was murder. Richard paid me enough to buy my silence, but no amount of money can buy peace. I see that boy's face in my dreams. Hear him screaming. I'm a coward and a monster, and one day I'll pay for what I helped them do.*

My hands shook. "Why are you showing me this?"

"Because my father wrote about you too. About how you were different from the rest of them. How you carried real guilt. How you tried to be better than your family even when it was impossible."

She leaned forward. "What really happened at that house, Victoria? What killed my father?"

I looked into her eyes. She deserved the truth. "Something they summoned twenty years ago. Something that came back for revenge."

I expected her to laugh. To call me crazy. Instead, she nodded slowly.

"My father believed in things most people don't. Old things. Dark things. He told me once that the Ashbourne family had secrets that went back centuries. That they'd done terrible things to keep their power."

"They sacrificed my brother. Burned him alive in a ritual to save their fortune. And twenty years later, something wearing his face came back to collect the debt."

Eleanor didn't look shocked. She looked sad. "And now they're all dead."

"Not all. My mother is still alive. Barely."

"And you?"

"I made a deal. Offered myself in exchange for her life. But the entity took my suffering instead of my death. Said it was enough to break the contract."

Eleanor stood and walked to the window. "My father spent twenty years trying to make up for what he did. Donated to charities. I volunteered at hospitals. Helped people for free. But it didn't matter. In the end, his guilt killed him just as surely as any disease."

"I'm sorry," I said again.

She turned to face me. "Don't be. He made his choices. We all do. The question is what you're going to do with yours."

"What do you mean?"

"You survived, Victoria. You're free of that house and that family. You have a chance to be something different. Something better. Don't waste it drowning in guilt like my father did."

She picked up her bag. "I'm going to tell the police it was a heart attack. That there's nothing suspicious about any of the deaths at Ashbourne Manor. My father's journal will be buried with him. The truth dies with our generation."

"Why would you do that?"

"Because some stories are too dark to tell. Because the world doesn't need to know what your family did. And because you deserve a chance to start over without that shadow following you."

She walked to the door, then paused. "One more thing. There's something in my father's journal you should read. The last entry."

After she left, I flipped to the final page. The handwriting was shaky, written the day before he died.

*I'm going back to Ashbourne Manor tomorrow. Richard called about his birthday party. I don't want to go. I haven't set foot in that house since the night we killed the boy. But I have to. I need to see if the rumors are true. If something has come back. If the debt is finally coming due. Maybe I'll find peace in paying for my sins. Maybe death is the only absolution left for men like me.*

I closed the journal and pressed it to my chest.

Dr. Whitmore had gone to the manor knowing he might die. Wanting to die. Seeking the punishment he'd avoided for twenty years.

Was that what I wanted too? To be punished? To suffer for my silence?

I looked at myself in the mirror. My face was pale, my eyes hollow. I looked like a ghost.

But I was alive. Eleanor was right about that. I'd survived when everyone else had fallen.

The question was what to do with that survival.

I could go back to the manor. Back to Mother and the ruins of our family. Try to rebuild something from the ashes.

Or I could walk away. Start over somewhere new. Become someone who wasn't an Ashbourne.

My phone buzzed again. I'd turned it back on without thinking. Another message from Mother.

*The house is falling apart. Please come home. I can't do this alone.*

I stared at the message for a long time. Then I typed a reply.

*I'm not coming back. You'll have to face this alone. Like Elias did.*

I hit send and turned the phone off again.

Tomorrow I will decide where to go. What to become. Who to be without my family name weighing me down.

But tonight, I will grieve. For Elias. For Thomas. For Father and Whitmore and even for Mother.

For the family we could have been if money hadn't mattered more than love.

For the innocent boy who died screaming while his family watched.

For all of us who were broken by that night and never found a way to heal.

I lay down on the bed and closed my eyes. Sleep came slowly, but when it did, I dreamed of Elias.

Not burning. Not screaming. Just smiling, the way he used to when we were children and the world was still kind.