Blood has a scent.
Not just the iron-sharp tang of it but something deeper. It smells like memory. Like fear. Like the last heartbeat before silence.
And tonight, the estate reeked of it.
Valentina had bled before. Papercuts. Scrapes. Once, a knife across her thigh when she was fifteen and too stubborn to hand over her gold bracelet to a street thief.
But this wasn’t that.
This was the kind of blood that came with blurred vision, with deafening silence pressing against the ears, with limbs trembling and lungs gasping for air that wouldn’t come fast enough.
It had started with a sound.
A single, sharp crack. Not the mechanical precision of a gun. But the soft, intimate whisper of betrayal.
A door opened.
She turned, saw the glint of steel.
Then heat. Searing pain across her ribs.
