The house breathed her in.

  The door swung shut with a slow, deliberate weight, the sound echoing too long through the empty halls. The air inside was thick - not just stale, but waiting. Dust floated in the slanting afternoon light, hanging motionless, as if time had frozen within these walls.

  Sandra inhaled, slowly and carefully. Her fingers curled up against her dress. "It smells the same."

  Lea had expected decay. Decay. The smell of rot sinking into the floorboards, the walls peeling from time and neglect. But instead, it was untouched. The furniture sat in place, the bookshelves neatly lined with dust-covered spines. The floor was scuffed, but not disturbed. The windows were steamed up, but not broken. Everything was just as it had been. And yet everything was wrong.

  Gemini stepped forward first, moving like a cat slipping back into its den. Her bare feet whispered against the wooden floor, and her hands trailed along the walls, leaving no marks in the thick dust. "The house remembers us," she muttered. Sandra swallowed.

  Lea felt the shift in the air, the way the house seemed to close in on them. The light filtering through the windows was too thin, too far away. It barely touched the walls, as if it struggled to reach them at all. Lea let out a slow breath. "Stay together."

  She didn't like the way the house felt. Not abandoned. Not ruined. Just paused. Like a book left open in the middle of a sentence, waiting for the reader to return.

  Gemini grinned over her shoulder. "Scared?" Lea's jaw tensed. "No." Gemini tilted her head. "You should be."

  Sandra flinched. Somewhere deep inside the house, the floorboards were shifting. Not from them. Not from movement. Something that had been waiting for them to return. The house sighed. And the dust hung in the air. Unmoved. Undisturbed. Unchanged.

  The dust should have stirred. The air in the house should have moved with them, should have shifted beneath their footsteps, unsettled by the return of bodies that had once lived here. But nothing did.

  The dust hung, frozen in the faint afternoon light, like ashes caught in midfall. The air did not shift. Not as Sandra walked forward, not as Lea followed, not even as Gemini's fingers idly trailed over the furniture. Everything was too still. Lea's boots clicked against the floorboards, loud in the silence. Sandra stepped further in, her eyes sweeping the room - quick, sharp, searching. Then she stopped. Lea followed her gaze. The chair.

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  The one her father had always sat in, back when he was more than a shadow of a man, drowning in debt, before his suicide, when the girls were too young to remember much about him. It stood by the cold fireplace, slightly tilted as if someone had just been in it. But that didn't stop Sandra.

  The chair still rocked. A slow, subtle creaking, as if something had just stood up. Sandra stiffened. "Lea-" Lea moved quickly, stepping between her and the chair, her hand instinctively reaching for the knife she no longer carried. The chair settled. The rocking stopped. A deep, pulsing silence pressed into the space it left behind, thick and watchful.

  Lea didn't breathe. Didn't even blink.

  Then a clink. From the dining table. Lea's eyes snapped to it. A plate. Porcelain. Perfectly clean. And a fork beside it. A meal that had never been eaten. But the plate wasn't covered in dust. It wasn't untouched by time. It was fresh. As if someone had just set it down.

  Sandra's breath caught. Lea's muscles tightened. Gemini just sighed. As if she had expected this. As if she had waited for it. Lea's fingers clenched at her sides. "The house is empty," she said, slow, measured. Controlled. Gemini's grin deepened. "No," she murmured. The floorboards creaked beneath them.

  The walls breathed. Not loudly. Not in ragged exhales or shifting moans. But slowly. Subtly. Like lungs that had been still for years, waiting for someone to notice. Lea noticed. So did Sandra.

  She stepped back from the table, her wide eyes darting between the chair that had rocked on its own and the plate that should not have been fresh. "This isn't right," she whispered.

  Lea's jaw tightened. "No." It wasn't. The house was too untouched. As if no one had been there since the night they left. The air was too thick. Time had not moved in this place. It had stayed. And now so had they.

  Sandra's hands trembled slightly at her sides, her fingers twitching as if she were resisting the urge to reach for Lea's coat like she used to do with her mother when she was little. But she didn't. She was older now. And she understood that Lea couldn't protect her from this.

  There was a groan in the wooden beams above them.

  The floorboards shifted - not from their weight, but from something else. Something listening. Sandra's breath came faster. She turned to Lea, her voice barely a whisper. "Do you hear that?" Lea did. Not the creaking. Not the wind. Something softer. Something inside the walls.

  Lea's pulse remained steady. She turned her head slightly, listening. There it was.

  A sound under the floorboards. A sound behind the wallpaper. A sound like many voices speaking at once, too low to understand.

  The walls were whispering.

  Sandra took another step back. Lea didn't move. She had spent her life commanding rooms full of criminals. Negotiating with men who would slit her throat at the slightest hint of weakness. And yet this was different. This was something older than men.

  Gemini exhaled, tilting her head. Listening. Then, after a moment, she nodded. As if she understood. As if she agreed.

  Lea's stomach tightened. "What are you doing?"

  Gemini didn't look at her. She was still listening. Then, finally, her lips curled subtly into something small. "Just getting acquainted."

  Sandra shivered. The whispers continued. The walls sighed again. And Lea knew they were not alone in this house. They never had been.