I tried to focus on the paperback in my lap. The heroine was currently swooning over a dark, mysterious duke in a drafty castle. The trope felt less like fiction and more like a cruel mirror. The words were just ink on wood pulp though. My mind kept drifting, sliding away from the “Duke of Ravenwood” and back to the ghosts in the bookshelf.
How many women had sat here? Had they felt the same skin-crawling stillness? I was afraid to look again, to see when the entries stopped.
I looked down at my hands. I felt filthy. It wasn’t just the grime of the mountain. Sweat and mush from the monster’s claim on me clung to my skin and soaked into my clothes. I ached for a hot bath and the simple dignity of fresh clothes that didn’t reek of a tavern or a monster’s bed. I wondered if the other “que
