The realization hit Ethan hard. If there was one, there had to be another.
Lily knelt near the piano, peering into a narrow opening at the base of the wall. “There’s a nest,” she murmured. “That was just a scout. It wasn’t here to steal your sight.”
“Then what was it doing?” Ethan asked.
“Protecting something you didn’t want to see.”
Lucas extended his hand. “Take the other one out. I trust you.”
This time, Ethan didn’t stop her.
Lily removed a second Nocturne, larger and darker than the first. It lay still in her palm.
Then she screamed—not in fear, but pain.
“They’re guarding something bigger,” she gasped.
From inside the wall came a wet, multiplying sound. The air filled with a metallic stench.
“They’re in there,” Ethan whispered.
He ordered the wall torn open.
Inside the cavity were dozens of Nocturnes, clustered together, feeding not on flesh—but on the darkness created by Lucas’s suppressed memories.
At the center sat something that didn’t belong.
A small wooden music box.
Ethan recognized it instantly. It had belonged to Lucas’s mother, Claire Caldwell, who had died in a car crash twelve years earlier—the same day Lucas went blind.