Page 1 of A Smile Full of Lies (Secrets of Stonewood #1)

Chapter

One

KNOX

“Hey, Mr. Knox — it’s Josh Walker with Southern Scare Collective. Just wondering if you’d be open to discussing a potential Halloween event opportunity at Stonewood Manor…”

I stared at the screen. For three seconds, I didn’t breathe.

Stonewood Manor.

Just seeing the name sent a cold rush down my spine. My pulse throbbed in my throat, and something hot twisted behind my ribs.

That house wasn’t a venue. It wasn’t some abandoned Southern gothic backdrop for a fucking haunted hayride.

It was where my mother bled out in the foyer, where my sister’s body was found on the second floor, face down on the hardwood she used to dance barefoot across when she thought no one was watching.

Ava. She was nineteen and so goddamn alive it hurt to be around her sometimes.

She’d come out to me six months before the murders, late one night when I caught her sneaking in through the side gate with smudged eyeliner and a black eye she swore was from cheer practice. But it wasn’t, and I fucking knew it. I stared her down until she admitted the truth.

Some asshole she’d been hooking up with — a guy a year or so older than her, who didn’t like finding her pressed up against a girl in the hall closet at a party — hit her when she told him he wasn’t owed anything because she was bisexual, and not his property.

He’d tried to slut shame her. She spat blood on his too-expensive tennis shoes and told him to go fuck himself.

By the time I found out, it was too late for me to beat his ass.

I decided to send a more life-altering message instead.

So I found the party’s security footage, hacked into the system, pulled the clip of him hitting my sister, and sent it to every college he’d applied to since taking a couple of gap years after he graduated from high school — including Stonewood University.

He didn’t get in anywhere he wanted to go.

Ava never asked me to do it. She never thanked me either. But the next time I saw her, she smiled like she knew his ruin was my doing.

“Don’t tell Mom and Dad about me being bi,” she’d whispered that night. “Not yet. Just — let me be your problem for a while.”

I told her she was never a problem. Not to me. Not once.

But she died without ever telling our parents the truth. The murderer took away her chance to grow into living fully as her authentic self. I resented that loss every day of my life.

My hands clenched so hard the phone screen threatened to crack.

We were supposed to go on a family trip the weekend they died. We should have all been in Atlanta for the weekend, at some dumb pumpkin festival Ava had begged to go to.

I’d bowed out last minute because I was following a lead on the girl I was almost sure Thayer, my asshole best friend, was cheating on Rosalind Cooper with.

Ros was my obsession, even then. She had been since I was eighteen years old.

From the first moment I saw her, seven years ago now, she burrowed under my skin.

I couldn’t outrun the magnetic pull she had on me, no matter how hard I tried, despite the fact that she was dating Thayer when we officially met for the first time.

I’d gone to Gulf Shores that weekend instead of going with my family. That’s where I was when Dad called me on Saturday morning to say the whole trip was off anyway. Something urgent came up at the company he’d built from the ground up, Knox Cybersecurity Incorporated.

“We’ll reschedule,” he said.

We never did. That chance died with them.

If my father hadn’t been a workaholic, he and my mother and sister might still be alive.

If I hadn’t been obsessed with proving Thayer was a piece of shit who didn’t deserve Ros, I might have died with them. In a sick twist of fate, my obsession with Rosalind Cooper had saved my life, and subjected me to the most excruciating pain I’d ever experienced, all at once.

If we’d gone — if I’d just pushed harder to make the Atlanta trip happen — maybe my family would still be alive. And none of this — the blood, the press always circling me like bloodhounds, the endless fucking aftermath — would’ve happened.

But none of those what-if scenarios happened, and instead of a consolation Sunday brunch with my mom, my mother’s friends got silence and a no-show. They instantly knew something was wrong. My mother would never stand anyone up without calling to explain herself, much less her best friends.

A cop was sent to Stonewood Manor for a welfare check, a rookie beat cop named Alyssa Allen who didn’t know what she was walking into until it was too late.

She’s the one who found their bodies. She’s the one who called me.

“You need to come home, Knox. Something terrible happened.”

I still hear her voice sometimes. Still see her cell phone number on the screen. Still taste the bile I swallowed trying to get to my car without screaming because I knew whatever had happened, it must be really fucking bad.

I’d never get the image of my entire family being wheeled out of the house in body bags out of my head. Having to identify them was worse. Ava’s pale, lifeless face still haunted my nightmares even four years later.

I never wanted to go back inside that house. And I didn’t. Not until three years after the murders. The first time I walked through those doors again, I ducked back outside and threw up in the hydrangeas.

I wasn’t about to let a group that called themselves the fucking Southern Scare Collective use the site of my family’s murder as a goddamn venue.

Mostly, I avoided Stonewood Manor at all costs and kept to my small, normal house next door to the Coopers on the other side of town. My father had once called it the wrong side of the tracks, but it could never be wrong, because it was right next door to Ros.

Of course, I had convinced my parents to let me buy it with money from my trust fund when I was eighteen, because it was only two blocks away from Stonewood University’s campus, but my mother hadn’t been as easily fooled as my father.

She’d seen my obsession with Ros for what it was, and warned me not to let it consume me like my father had allowed his job to consume him.

Still, the thought of someone wanting to use Stonewood Manor as a gimmicky Halloween venue pissed me the fuck off. My jaw locked, fire boiling low in my gut.

Then I called Josh Walker back.

He answered on the second ring, chipper as hell.

“Mr. Knox! I wasn’t sure I’d hear back so quickly.”

“Then you clearly don’t understand who the fuck you’re speaking to.”

Silence flooded the line. I waited.

“Well,” he tried, his tone light and practiced.

Suddenly I could picture him on the other end of the phone, a salesman with too-white teeth and a slick veneer, “I was reaching out because my team had this idea for a… specialty haunted house event. It would be high-end and exclusive. No lame-ass actors in cloaks from The Party Barn or anything like that. Think immersive horror, full blackout zones, elite guests, full press coverage. We’ve done similar events at historical sites in Savannah and Charleston?—”

“No.”

“Sir, if I could just finish the pitch?—”

“You’re talking about a haunted house,” I said, voice like ice, “in my house. The same house where my mother, father, and nineteen-year-old sister were murdered in cold blood. That’s your pitch?”

“To clarify,” he backpedaled fast, “it wouldn’t be a ‘haunted house’ in the cheesy sense. It would be an immersive art-meets-horror event. We’d honor the space — lean into real fear and the site’s real history.”

“Let me guess,” I muttered. “You’d charge triple what you should and sell VIP tickets to bored rich assholes who want to scream and pretend it means something.”

Josh hesitated.

I smiled, but it was more me baring my teeth than anything else. If he could have seen me, my smile would have sent chills up his spine, because the ice in my veins told me I was about to take pleasure in his pain.

“There it is.” I snorted and shook my head.

“I’m just saying — this kind of thing pulls numbers,” he said. “With the anniversary of the murders coming up, and if you gave permission… it could be a massive draw. We’re talking a multi-weekend event. Live streams. Sponsor interest. The media alone?—”

“You think I want fucking media attention?” My voice dropped lower. Sharper. “You think I want cameras in the rooms where my family died?”

“I — I understand it’s sensitive?—”

“No, you fucking don’t.” I let the silence breathe. “You don’t know a goddamn thing about what happened in that house.”

Josh rushed to fill the gap.

“I don’t mean to be insensitive. But the public’s fascination with what happened to your family is already there.

You might as well profit from it. Everyone else will.

We’re not talking horror hobbyists. We’re talking high society.

Six-figure sponsorships. VIP guest lists. The potential payout could be?—”

“I inherited fifteen million dollars and a thriving cybersecurity company when my family was murdered.” My voice was even, dripping with finality.

“I’ve more than doubled my inheritance in the years since.

Do I sound like I need your haunted house chump change?

Let me give you a hint, since you’re obviously in over your head, here.

Even if I didn’t have a dime to my name, I wouldn’t consider profiting off my family’s spilled blood. ”

Josh went quiet. I let that silence drag before I spoke again.

“The only thing you’d be selling,” I said, “is a fantasy built on my trauma. You want guests to scream? Tell them how long my sister tried to run before her killer caught her. You want mood lighting? Try black lights over blood that won’t come out of the goddamn hardwood floor.”

“Mr. Knox?—”

“No.”

“I — I understand,” he stammered, finally sounding shaken. “Of course. I’m sorry. I was just following up on a lead. We heard you’d been seen around town more lately, so I figured maybe you were ready to, I don’t know… re-engage with the public.”

My jaw flexed. So that’s what this was. They’d seen me at places like the grocery store, the pharmacy, and the hardware store. They’d noticed the reclusive fuck who barely left his house unless dragged suddenly making regular appearances around town in Stonewood.

What they didn’t know was why.

Ros hadn’t left her house since her grandmother’s funeral three weeks ago. Not once. Not even to check the mail.

I’d been the one running around like a ghost in broad daylight, picking up everything she needed and everything she wouldn’t ask for.

I’d let myself in with the spare key she gave me and unpacked groceries on her kitchen counter like I was just being neighborly.

I pretended I wasn’t watching her through the blinds to make sure she ate.

It took everything I had in me to act like I wasn’t three seconds from losing my shit every time I saw her, and she looked more weary and brittle than she did the day before.

And this asshole somehow thought that meant I was ready to hand over the keys to my family’s murder scene.

“I wasn’t re-engaging,” I snapped. It had nothing to do with re-engaging. “I was making sure someone I care about didn’t fucking starve.”

My reappearance out and about in Stonewood had everything to do with her.

Josh went quiet. Then, with oily sympathy smeared across his voice, he murmured, “Of course. Of course. I’m — uh — I’m really sorry to hear that. About your friend. Or family. Or whoever they are. That must be really hard. I didn’t mean to imply?—”

“You didn’t imply anything,” I growled. “You said it outright. You saw a man crawling out of his shell and thought you could slap a fucking price tag on it.”

Josh laughed nervously, a thin, jittery sound.

“Okay, okay — I get it. Bad timing, bad optics. I’m just the guy they send to make the call and pitch the idea. It wasn’t meant to be personal.”

“It’s always personal when it’s my family’s murder you’re trying to monetize.”

Another beat of silence stretched between us. Then he tried again, clinging to his script like it might save him.

“Look, I totally understand why this feels raw. I do. But sometimes, you know, the right event — handled carefully — can help people process and heal. It can even help people honor what was lost. This could be?—”

“Stop talking.”

Josh did. His voice went dead quiet.

“You called me with a pitch for a haunted house. You wanted access to a crime scene you thought my feelings might have dulled about over the last four years. You thought enough money would soften the rough edges of your pitch.”

“I didn’t mean to offend?—”

“You did. Congratulations.”

I moved to end the call, but he scrambled to get in one last word.

“Look, I get it. I do. But just in case — just in case — you ever change your mind…”

My jaw clenched. What possessed me to let this stupid son of a bitch keep talking for this long? I think part of me wanted him to grasp just how far over the line his pitch was, but nothing I said was permeating the fog, apparently.

“I’ll leave my number,” he finished. “October’s a big month for us. If you reconsider, I’ll make sure you get a top-tier package. We’d give you full creative control and the final say over everything. We could even donate part of the proceeds to a memorial fund?—”

“I’m going to say this slowly,” I interrupted. “So it sinks in.”

He shut up.

“I don’t want your fucking haunted house. I don’t want your guests. I don’t want your money. I don’t want strangers playing pretend in the home where my mother, father, and nineteen-year-old sister all bled out on the goddamn floor. Do you hear me?”

“Yes,” he said, his voice small now. “Loud and clear.”

“Good,” I said, and ended the call.

I stared at the phone for a long time, listening to my pulse throbbing in my ears. He’d text me his number anyway. They always did. Just in case.

But there was no fucking case, no what-if, no scenario I could conceive of in which I handed over the keys to that house.

The walls still remembered. So did I.

No one would ever set foot in Stonewood Manor again — not while I was alive. Not for entertainment. Not for money. Not for anything.

That house wasn’t a haunted attraction.

It was a grave, and some things should stay buried.