Chapter 1 - The Boy Beneath the House
Ten-year-old Owen DeLuca had been secretly taking food from the mansion kitchen and carrying it to an old service elevator in the abandoned west wing. When Luca DeLuca unexpectedly returned home, he noticed both his son's strange behavior and the way his sister Celeste was intimidating maid Hannah Brooks.
Hannah finally admitted that Owen had been visiting the supposedly broken elevator for weeks.
But the elevator was not broken.
Someone had secretly powered it.
Beneath the mansion, Luca discovered a hidden second basement filled with children's drawings, locked rooms, and evidence that another child had been living there. Owen revealed that the child's name was Ben and that Celeste had warned him never to tell anyone.
Behind a locked door, Luca found Ben—a thin ten-year-old boy who looked almost identical to Owen.
Then an even greater shock arrived.
Luca's mother, whom the world believed had died eighteen years earlier, stepped from the elevator and told him he had never been meant to find “both of them.” She then produced an old photograph showing Hannah as a newborn in Rebecca DeLuca's arms with the words:
KEEP HER AWAY FROM LUCA.
Before anyone could understand what it meant, a hidden steel door unlocked.
From the darkness came the voice of Luca's wife Rebecca, who had supposedly died three years earlier.
Her first words were:
May you like
“Where are my boys?”
And Luca realized the second child beneath his house was only the beginning.
