The estate's guest room had become a tomb by midnight, its walls closing in like the frost-veins in Frostfire, every shadow a reminder of the fracture. Elara lay curled under the covers, the burner phone discarded on the nightstand like a traitor's token, her notebook's pages blurred by dried tears. Julian's words echoed—calculated? To find loopholes?—a venom that poisoned the trust they'd built brick by fragile brick. The storm's intimacy, the dawn's confessions, Voss's truths... all reframed through his pain-forged lens as deception, Hale's ghost resurrected to haunt them anew. She hadn't meant to wound him, but intent mattered little against the raw edge of betrayal, his walls not just up, but fortified into an impenetrable frost.
Sleep evaded her, the clock's digital glow mocking the
