The heart didn't beat it wept.
Thick, black tears oozed from its ventricles, each drop bursting into smoke that formed screaming infant faces before dissolving. The cage bars constructed from ribs, femurs, and tiny spinal columns fused together—pulsed like a second set of lungs around it. The air reeked of copper and spoiled honey, clinging to the back of Jacob's throat like a physical presence.
Eleanor collapsed beside him, her empty eye socket streaming not blood but ink, the liquid forming words across the floor that slithered like live eels:
"she was the first to say no"
The crow landed on the heart, its talons sinking into the rotten muscle with a sound like tearing parchment. "Look closer," it rasped.
Jacob's vision fractured
A girl no older than eight, her brown curls matted with blood, standing in this same cage. Not Eleanor. Another. The first Eleanor. Lord Blackwood's great-grandfather (same cold eyes, same ring of keys at his belt) pressed a rusted scalpel to her lips. "You'll teach the Crow its lines," he said. "Or your sister burns at dawn."
The girl shaking her head. The lord sighing as he threaded a needle with crow feathers. "Then you'll learn silence first."
Centuries later, the same girl (now hollow-eyed, her lips a scarred seam) carving sigils into a young Jacob's forearm. "This will make you remember," she whispered. "What they made us do." Her hands trembled not from fear, but from the effort of holding back. "The house is listening."
The vision shattered as the heart convulsed, vomiting up a flood of Hands.
Dozens of tiny, skeletal hands that scrabbled at Jacob's boots, their fingerbones clicking against the stone. The crow flapped wildly as the heart's surface split, its necrotic tissue peeling back to reveal the final horror:
Embedded in the pulpy muscle lay the real Emily.
Not smoke. Not bones.
A preserved child, no older than four, her skin pearl-gray, her eyelids stitched open to reveal eyes that still moved, tracking Jacob with terrible awareness. Needle-thin roots burrowed into her nostrils and mouth, feeding her just enough air to sustain consciousness.
Eleanor made a sound like a dying animal. "They never let her die."
The crow pecked at Emily's stitches. "The house needs its angel."
Jacob reached for the blood-key And Emily spoke through the heart's veins, her voice vibrating the cage bars:
"You promised to burn with me."
The walls shrieked as the bones began to close around them.