Chapter 17
Elara’s POV
The palace walls pressed in on me more with each passing day. They were gilded, beautiful, heavy with centuries of history, yet to me they felt less like protection and more like a cage. After the attempt on my life, guards doubled their presence at every corner, and my every movement seemed shadowed. Some part of me understood Lucien’s reasoning, yet another part whispered restlessly that there was more he wasn’t telling me.
And it always came back to the portraits.
The image of the woman in the secret room haunted my mind—her face identical to mine, painted decades ago. I couldn’t look in the mirror without imagining her features overlapping with mine, until the line between us blurred. Was she an ancestor? A coincidence? Or something far more dangerous?
The s
