The chamber was silent. Too silent.
I pressed my palms against the stone to see if I could feel any trace of her. My throat was raw from screaming, but the echoes had already faded, and there was nothing left to hear but the rasp of my own panicked breath.
“Wren?” My voice was hoarse and feeble.
The dark had receded just enough for the torch on the distant wall to sputter back into flame, but the place where she had been (where her hands had dug into the stone until her nails bled) was now nothing more than polished stone. As if she had never lived.
A hollow laugh escaped me, half laugh, half sob. My brain tried to convince me that this was just another of their tricks, that she would come back with some snarky comment about my awful timing. But the silence taunted me.
The masked one
