The Hollow Keep did not sleep.
It breathed.
Each wall hummed with power, each corridor lined with old blood and older bones. Amara sat alone on the obsidian throne, her back straight, her eyes closed—but she wasn’t resting.
She was remembering.
Flashes returned in violent bursts. Screams. Fire. A name—Amara—called not in reverence but in fear. And through it all, a symbol: a crescent moon carved into a woman’s chest. Her mother’s? Her jailer’s?
She didn’t know. Not yet.
But it was coming back. All of it.
And she had Cain to thank.
As if summoned by thought, he appeared in the doorway, lazy and lethal as ever. His shirt hung open, revealing the ink scrawled across his ribs—marks that matched the language scrawled into the Keep’s stone walls.
He strolled forward like he owned the pl
