The room felt smaller, tighter, though the walls hadn’t moved. Shadows stretched, twisted, and seemed to pulse with the weight of secrets I hadn’t even uncovered yet. My heart hammered, loud enough that I was sure the intruders could hear it. Every nerve screamed alert, every thought, every calculation, every memory collided at once.
Adrian stepped beside me, a solid presence in the chaos, but his expression was unreadable. Gray eyes locked on the new figure across the room, assessing, calculating, measuring danger. His jaw tightened. I could feel the tension in his posture, the restrained power, the fire behind his calm.
The figure ahead smiled, slow and deliberate. It was a predator’s smile, careful, controlled, designed to provoke, to test. “You’ve been playing a game,” they said soft
