Chapter 35
Eun-Ae The palace was never quiet. Even in the dead of night the halls whispered—crickets outside the papered windows, guards pacing their posts, the occasional bark of a wolf-hound straining against its chain. Yet tonight the air felt different. Heavy. I stood at the veranda just beyond Dae-Hyun’s chamber, the cold stone tiles biting at my bare feet. My tails flicked in sharp, restless arcs, each one tugged by an unseen current. Ears pricked forward, then twitched back. Something lingered in the distance. Something foul. Bool-He. I could taste his stench on the wind, acrid and slick, like rotting pearls crushed into ash. My claws pressed into the railing as my chest tightened with the instinct to leap, to tear, to finish the hunt we’d failed to end in the village. My body thrummed wi
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