Easternport Vol. 1, First Edition

Krieg - Part 2

Miles

My grandmother said all the secret passage ways connect to the kitchen. She said her father liked sneaking snacks and he liked keeping the servants out of sight and out of the way. So searching the kitchen was the most logical way to find the hidden passages of the house.

I had been wanting to search the room ever since we first set foot in this house, but I couldn't do it with Mikkel and Nate around. I had to wait until they went to town to gamble at night. Cory would be off doing nothing at her new job of slave to my twin and I'd be home trying not to think about any of that or how unnerving this house was. A lot of the time was spent doing chores like cleaning up the study to draw Mikkel's attention away from the kitchen. Don't tell him I said that. I think he's still searching the damned study to try to find what he thinks I know about it.

Mikkel

Ha!

Let me give you a little lesson in secret keeping, Miles. If you want to keep a secret from me, don't write it down!

Miles

I see you've found my notebook. Congratulations. Now stay out of my stuff.

Mikkel

Your lack of explosion makes me think that perhaps there is something in the study that you're hiding, but you've tried to mislead me about it, now. ...And your notebook was ludicrously easy to find...

Miles

Will you please talk to me in person about these things and stop scrawling all over the margins of my notebook?

It took me a while to find the opening, but there it was—right next to where we sat and ate every night. A larger than normal crack in the stones gave it away. I jimmied the wall open with a slim iron bar and immediately started to look for signs that Mikkel had been there. But that was definitely not the case. The passage was so covered in cobwebs that it made my skin crawl just looking at it. Using the iron bar to clear the cobwebs, I made my way up the narrow passage staircase until I hit a juncture somewhere on the second floor. I was slowly forming a map in my head of where I could be. Above the kitchen was the master bedroom which none of us wanted to sleep in. It was too creepy. If I went that way, I'd probably trip over human bones. He wasn't a vampire, but he was definitely not docile. ...Or sane.

So I kept going straight, which I was sure would lead to my bedroom as well as Mikkel's and Nate's, which were next door to mine.

I could hear the front door slam shut. The walls carried the sound everywhere. Even before she called out, I knew it had to be Cory. The bastards wouldn't be home this early unless they were just bent on ruining my night.

I wasn't ready for her to know all of this. Mikkel had a grip on her that I didn't like and if she knew about this passage way, then he'd know about the passageway.

I felt bad. Husbands shouldn't keep secrets from their wives, right? I did it all too often. It had nothing to do with her and everything to do with him. It was just another battle against Mikkel and one that puzzled me the most—how to get his talons out of my wife. This rivalry of ours was getting out of hand. And the poor girl was oblivious to it. Sure, she picked up on a few angry exchanges here and there, but she never seemed to grasp the picture of what was going on. She saw the three of us brothers as inseparable—which we were. But that didn't mean we occasionally didn't want to kill each other. It was in our blood.

I had closed the kitchen passage door behind me, so I didn't have to worry about her finding that. As she made her way through the house calling out to me, I pushed through the first door I came to on the second floor. It opened into the hallway closet.