Chapter 1 - THE HOUSE THAT SWALLOWED PEOPLE
Everyone in Newport laughed when Nathan Vance paid $3.2 million for the abandoned Ostrander estate.
The mansion had been empty for six years, ever since a mysterious September night in 2019 when two people were reported dead, a guesthouse burned, and the owner’s widow vanished before eventually being declared one of the victims.
The official investigation lasted only eleven days.
Articles disappeared.
Questions stopped being asked.
And no buyer stayed inside the mansion after dark.
Nathan ignored every warning.
He was the feared owner of Vance Harbor Logistics, a company with legitimate shipping contracts on paper and generations of darker influence beneath them. Newspapers called him a mafia boss. Nathan never bothered correcting them.
Only Warrick Hollis—the sixty-one-year-old man who had raised Nathan after his father’s death—dared question why Nathan had spent millions on a decaying estate everyone else considered cursed.
Nathan refused to explain.
Boston investor Prescott Lyle offered a stranger warning. He admitted he had nearly purchased the property in 2019 but withdrew after receiving a mysterious phone call at one in the morning.
The caller had said only one thing.
That house swallows people.
Detective Whitaker Doyle also approached Nathan after the auction. Doyle had spent years privately questioning the original investigation and believed the two deaths had never been properly explained.
Nathan listened to both men.
But neither knew the real reason he had purchased the estate.
Inside the auction catalog was an old photograph of the mansion.
Standing beneath the veranda was a woman with her back to the camera.
Her hand rested on the head of a young black mastiff.
Nathan recognized both of them.
The woman was his younger sister, Lydia Vance.
She had disappeared six years earlier.
And the mastiff beside her was Rook—the enormous black dog that had mysteriously appeared outside Nathan’s warehouse three days after the Ostrander fire, bleeding from a deep wound across his throat.
Rook had survived.
But from that night forward, the dog had never barked again.
Nathan had spent six years searching for Lydia.
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Now he finally knew where she had been before she vanished.
And he intended to find out what happened inside the house everyone else was too frightened to enter.
