Serena’s POV
The house was quiet in a way that unsettled me. No distant footsteps in the hall, no low murmurs of the guards changing shifts, not even the familiar rhythm of the city bleeding in through the windows. It was as if the world itself held its breath. My Mother who completed my world was now gone too and the world became quieter.
I sat in the lounge, curled on the sofa, a book open in my lap though my eyes hadn’t moved past the same paragraph in nearly twenty minutes. The words blurred, dissolving into the storm of thoughts that refused to leave me. My mother’s absence was a weight I could neither carry nor set down, and though Kael had been patient so impossibly patient I felt the distance between us grow with each passing day.
The soft creak of the door broke my trance. I l
