While all eyes were on Rachel’s crisis, another storm swept through Salem: Chad DiMera — missing without a trace.

No text messages, no phone calls, no goodbyes.

An empty chair at the family dinner table, a few items left in disarray, and a chill running through the DiMera household.

This disappearance didn’t feel like running away. It felt like being taken.

EJ DiMera and Theo Carver immediately launched into a search. They turned every corner, mirrored Chad’s every move, listened to every last phone call. But everything pointed to one direction: the DiMera crypt — where secrets, the past, all the dark things no one wanted to talk about were buried.

Inside the crypt, it was rumored there were tunnels, locked rooms, and places never mapped. EJ and Theo shined their flashlights down the stairs, the wind howling chillingly. The old, rotten stonework, the moldy walls, and the whole place was thick with the history of sin. A few details made EJ shiver: Chad’s shoe prints in the dust.

Salem began to suspect: Chad was arrested because he knew something? Because he discovered a secret related to the family? Or was he hiding something that had now betrayed him? Whispers spread around every corner. Some heard faint cries from the crypt in the middle of the night. Some saw a gray figure passing through a side door.

EJ was truly panicked — because in DiMera, the past never sleeps. In the history of this house, people have “evaporated” and returned as different people, or not at all. And if Chad is locked away to silence a secret, the crypt will soon open the gates of hell.