The city stretched on forever down below, a crazy sea of sound and light. From the seventy-second floor, Adrian and Ava stood with the finest view of it all the cars that blared, the billboards that burned, people rushing through lives they'd never lived. But the noise never entered into it. Here, in back of glass and quiet, they might have been ghosts.
The twins had lived in the penthouse, their entire lives. It was beautiful marble floors, chandeliers dripping light like diamonds, a roof garden where vines crawled hungrily over the stone. There was beauty in its own kind of cruelty, however. It was the gilded cage that their parents had left for them.
They were only six when the questions began. Where were their parents? Why had they not come back? With each question, the housekeeper, Mrs. Caldwell, would quiet them with the same curt answer: "Your parents are out. That is all you need to know."
But children grow up. Questions turn into suspicions. And secrets have a habit of vibrating against the locks meant to confine them.
Adrian restless, observant, had always looked for cracks in the story. Ava quieter but equally curious, had memorized the order of every locked door in the penthouse, every "off-limits" room Mrs. Caldwell had deemed so. They reconstructed fragments: a piece of a diary page stuffed between floorboards, a scribbled phone number in the margin of an old book, flashes where their parents' faces looked blurry like time itself had conspired to delete them.
Still, the penthouse overshadowed their lives. Food delivered at programmed times. Schooling from individual tutors who never stayed long. No friends. No visitors. No freedom. The outside world was a far-off hum, close enough to reach with their eyes, but always out of their grasp.
That evening, on the evening of their seventeenth birthdays, the twins sat across from each other at the big dinner table, the city lights burning behind them like candles at a party they didn't want. Mrs. Caldwell had left a cake perfect, white, untouched and retired to her rooms, as if birthdays were tasks to be completed.
Ava pushed the cake aside. "It's just another day," she whispered.
Adrian leaned back in his chair, his eyes fixed on the floor-to-ceiling windows. "Perhaps not." His voice held the soft undertone she had learned to distinguish the one that signaled he was keeping something from her.
She opened her mouth to question him, but a noise shattered the quiet.
Tap.
They both turned toward the front door. No one ever knocked. Deliveries arrived by service elevator. Guests didn't visit. And yet there it was again.
Tap.
Adrian stood, scraping his chair over the marble. Ava's chest tightened as he crossed the room. The locks clicked one by one as he opened them, something neither had ever had the nerve to do. When the door groaned open, the hallway beyond stretched hollow.
Except for the envelope.
Blood-red. Closed. Slanted script: "The Children of the Heights."
Ava felt the air thicken about them. Adrian dropped to his haunches, retrieved it, and for an instant there was just the hum of the city far, far below.
He cracked the seal.
One line of script bled across the page in black ink:
Your parents didn't leave. They were taken.
A shiver coursed down Ava's spine as the words glared back at them. Seventeen years of silence exposed in an instant.
The glass cage in which they had lived no longer felt safe.
Ava trembled as she reached for the envelope, but Adrian halted her, his expression fixed. His eyes, so like hers, scanned the words repeatedly, waiting for repetition to make them change.
Your parents didn't leave. They were taken.
Nobody might have left this behind," Ava breathed. Her voice was too loud in the hushed silence of the penthouse. "The door was closed."
Adrian shook his head. "Not from inside." He looked over at the security panel beside the door, its green light blinking with rhythmic regularity. Locked. Sealed. Invulnerable. And yet, the envelope had been there.
Ava's heart constricted. They'd existed in fantasy for years, thinking the penthouse was out of their league, an unbreachable fortress of steel and glass. Now it felt like a set, the curtains pulled back to reveal they'd never been private to begin with.
Adrian stuffed the note into his pocket. "We can't let Caldwell lay eyes on this," he snarled.
Ava's eyes flicked across to the hallway where their housekeeper's door was closed. She had been there as long as they could remember polite, competent, always on hand but never warm. A warden, not a guardian. Could she have possibly taken the letter?
"Adrian"
He cut her off. "Don't say her name."
The walls seemed to slant forward. Ava's gaze flickered to the penthouse shadows, to the high mirrors holding their faces in shattered angles. How many times had she felt the creep of hidden eyes, the sensation of being observed?
Adrian strode over to the nearest window and rested his forehead on the glass. The city glowed below them, vast and inaccessible. "If this is true," he breathed, fogging the glass, "then Caldwell's been deceiving us."
Ava moved closer, her form hovering beside his. "Why wait so long?"
The question hung between them, more substantial than the silence. Seventeen years. Why this night? Why their birthday?
Behind them, a sudden creak cut the silence the shifting of a floorboard under strain.
Ava spun around.
The dining room was empty, the cake undisturbed, its candles ready to be lit. But the sound persisted, echoed from the hall which led on to the closed doors of their parents' wing.
Adrian's hand brushed her arm. His eyes were fierce now, alight with something between fear and excitement. "It means there's more," he said softly. "It means we're not crazy for asking all these years."
Ava wanted to believe him. She wanted to believe the letter was the beginning of answers, not the start of something worse.
But as the shadows stretched across the marble floor, she couldn't help but think that opening the envelope hadn't freed them.
It had opened a door they could never shut.
The groan of the floorboard sounded softly, and then it faded, leaving only the quiet of the penthouse. Ava's breath was frozen. "Someone's here."
Adrian didn't move, his jaw clamped. "Or something."
Before Ava could shove him, the creak of an opening door shattered the silence. The twins turned toward the hall.
Mrs. Caldwell came into sight. Her gray hair was pulled back into its familiar stiff knot, her posture stiff, her hands folded together over her apron. Her face showed nothing of the tension that filled the air, the feeling of secrets.
"You're both awake," she said flatly, her eyes sweeping the room as though cataloging every detail. Her gaze lingered on the door, still ajar. "Why is this unlocked?"
Ava's pulse thundered. Adrian subtly slid his hand over his pocket where the letter burned like a brand.
"No reason," Adrian said too quickly.
Mrs. Caldwell's eyes flicked to him. Sharp. Cold. They had learned early that lying to her was like stepping barefoot on glass you'd bleed sooner or later.
"Nothing happens in this apartment without my knowledge," she said. The words were simple, but they made Ava's skin prickle. "Lock the door. Now."
Adrian obeyed, snapping the bolts back into place. The echo seemed louder than usual.
Mrs. Caldwell had turned to leave, but then she hesitated. Her gaze rested on the cake that was still untouched on the table. "Seventeen," she murmured, to herself. "So like your mother."
Ava flinched. Caldwell never spoke of their parents. Ever.
Adrian stepped forward, his voice low but edged with steel. "Where are they?"
The housekeeper's face froze. For a heartbeat, her eyes betrayed something Ava had never seen before fear. Then the mask slipped back into place.
"Go to bed," she said sharply. "You'll need your rest."
"For what?" Ava blurted, her voice trembling.
Mrs. Caldwell's lips pressed into a thin line. She turned away, her footsteps clipped and steady as she vanished down the hallway.
The silence that followed was suffocating.
Adrian pulled the envelope back out and stared at it like it would scald his hand. "She knows," he breathed.
Ava's throat closed. For years, the penthouse had been their prison, their sanctuary, their own world. Now it was a trap squeezing shut around them.
And tonight, for the first time, they realized they weren't just being guarded.
They were being trapped.