ELENA'S POV
I didn't sleep. I sat on the floor of the small room at the end of the corridor with my back against the wall and let what Seraphine had told me settle into every part of me the way things settled when they were permanent. When there was no version of the future where you unknew them.
He had built my entire life.
The penthouse. The contract. Two years of starving and shrinking and surviving on scraps while Lucian looked through me like I was furniture.
My mother in a room she never left. All of it, every terrible thing I had called my circumstances, my bad luck, the life I was born into, was a blueprint someone had drawn before I existed.
I sat with that until the sky outside the small window went from black to gray to the pale flat light of early morning.
Then I heard fo
