SERENA POV
"The four a.m. cold," I said.
He was across the kitchen table from me. Midnight. The house was quiet, wrapped in the heavy, undisturbed silence that only settled over the estate when the perimeter guards completed their final sweep. Two cups of coffee sat between us, the dark liquid completely still, having gone cold twenty minutes ago because neither of us had actually been drinking them.
"Tell me," he said.
"It came through the stone walls," I said, my voice low but steady in the quiet room. "Every morning at the same time. Underground stone holds temperature differently from above-ground stone. It absorbs the midday heat, but it releases the cold it has accumulated over the previous twenty-four hours at a specific, predictable hour. I used it to track time. Every time the
