Hidden Symbols.

Elena slammed the front door of the house and sighed heavily. She was not used to issuing ultimatums or blackmailing anyone, but the fact that Nick possessed some important information was absolutely clear.

For reasons incomprehensible to her, she became attached to this guy from the first second she saw him and never felt any negative or potential threat from him. Therefore, the woman hoped that he would listen to her request and open himself to her.

The house was quiet, the whole Lee family and Sean went to the dolphinarium, and even the security guard and the maid were allowed to go home.

Elena looked around the living room and smiled, memories from a distant childhood surfaced in her head, she spent a lot of time here with her father, playing various board games or reading books in the evenings.

Sometimes Mr. Lee arranged sparring and taught her the basics of karate and sincerely rejoiced when the girl had her first successes.

Even though Elena could not be near her birth family, Chen treated the girl with such care that she never felt like a stranger in this house. She was sure that even if she could find her real father, he would not replace Chen Lee in her heart, whatever the reasons he had.

Maybe that's why she didn't really strive for this meeting because she felt that if her father wanted this, he would have found her himself a long time ago.

And if earlier she assumed that he was not alive, as well as her mother, then after that meeting at the cemetery, Elena was sure that her father was alive and knew about her. But why did he avoid her? She could not understand this.

Who knows, maybe he had a different family for a long time, and maybe Elena even had a brother or sister, whom she did not know about.

"Ugh, Elena, what the hell is creeping into your head? Remember why you came here!" the woman tapped her head slightly, casting out useless thoughts, and headed for her old bedroom.

A smile slid across her face as she opened the door of the room, and the scent of freshness met her on the threshold. Even if she had not lived here for a long time, Mr. Lee ordered her bedroom to be kept in perfect cleanliness to match some alpine resort filled with fresh and clean mountain air.

The woman opened the door to the dressing room, climbed into a chair and pulled a small shoe box from the top shelf.

Although the room was almost sterile clean, this box for many years still managed to become covered with a light layer of dust. Elena removed the top cover, a stack of neatly arranged notebooks lay in a box, like in some cache, hidden from prying eyes.

She began to take out notebooks one after another, on the cover of each of them was marked the year to which the notebook belonged.

The woman opened one of them, [Diary of Elena Lee, 9 years old] read the inscription on the first page. These notebooks were her diaries that she kept when she was still a child. For ten years, Elena kept a record of her dreams, in secret from her father, so as not to worry him.

She began to look through notebooks one by one. The incomprehensible images and scenes that bothered her earlier at night now made sense. Most of these dreams concerned her past life, several dreams were about her childhood, the rest were ordinary nightmares.

Elena sighed and folded the notebooks back into the box; unfortunately, she did not find anything that could give any clue. She looked at the time, almost twenty minutes passed.

"Ok, well, apparently today luck is not on my side," Elena put the box back on the top shelf, closed the door of the room, and went toward the living room.

The walls in the house, as before, were decorated with paintings by Liu Yang, and if earlier for Elena they were simply beautiful paintings reminiscent of Chen's wife, now that their family was together again, these paintings added special warmth and comfort to the surrounding space.

Elena smiled, glancing at one of the paintings hanging in the corridor, but taking a step forward she froze in place. The woman returned to the canvas to see in more detail a small feature that she had not paid attention to before.

In the corner of the picture, on top of the main drawing, another one was painted - a small, barely noticeable symbol, looking like an incomprehensible squiggle. She touched the dried paint and felt a slight tingling sensation at her fingertips.

The symbol, unremarkable to the average person, was an exact copy of one of the symbols in the ancient scroll that Nick brought with him. It was an ancient Sumerian language, which became extinct more than two thousand years ago.

Elena moved on to another painting and found the same symbol there, the woman's heart began beating faster when in each subsequent painting she found symbol by symbol.

She remembered that Liu Yang once said that she was preparing this collection for her first exhibition, but Amelia made her friend write other paintings, and keep these for herself. So, these characters were not casual here, knowing the power of her mother, Elena was sure that Amelia left these tips especially for her.

"So, and now what?" The woman pushed aside the coffee table and laid out all the paintings collected in the house on the floor. "I don't understand anything," Elena whispered and scratched her head. She hoped to receive some kind of encrypted message, but everything she could read sounded like some rubbish.

"And if like that?" The woman began to shift the pictures in places, changing them among themselves, until the chaotic set of characters began to add into a more or less logical phrase.

Fifteen minutes later, she had the final phrase, but there were a few signs that she did not know where to attach.

"Lord, Mom, why couldn't you do something simpler? A letter, a note, a drawing, whatever... That picture, then the pendant - you always have some riddles," she sighed, fingering the pendant in her hand that hung on the woman's neck.

"Stop...," a triumphant smirk slid across Elena's face, she removed the jewelry from her neck and looked at the small wheels located on the side of the pendant.

On each of them, a small symbol was drawn, like numbers in a combination lock on a suitcase or safe. The woman began to rotate one wheel after another, selecting characters according to the elements depicted in the paintings.

Click.

A light click made a smile on Elena's face, "Well, at last," she smirked and opened the pendant.