STELLA
The house feels different when I return. Not quieter, not louder — just different, like the walls know something has changed. The air has shifted. Every corner, every shadow, every polished surface seems to watch me, waiting for me to recognize that I no longer belong here. I belong in the Morozov mansion now.
My dress is gone. They peeled it off me the moment we came back, careful fingers tugging at lace and silk until I stood in the center of my room in nothing but my slip, bare and stripped down like evidence. The gown is folded somewhere now, a relic of a ceremony that already feels like it happened to someone else.
I sit on the edge of the bed for a long time, my body stiff, my head heavy, my hands lying useless in my lap. The silence presses in, the kind that fills the lun
