The house had started to feel like a place that listened.
Not in any supernatural way—nothing she could point to or explain—but in the way silence lingered too long outside her door, in the faint creak of floorboards that told her someone had paused just beyond the threshold and then moved on again. In the way she could never quite forget that she was being watched—not out of suspicion, but out of care.
That should have comforted her.
It did, sometimes.
Other times, like now, it made her feel like she couldn’t breathe.
Ravyn stood by the window in the room Sebastian had given her, her arms folded loosely across her chest as she stared out at the stretch of land beyond the house. It was beautiful, quiet, untouched, safe— safer than she’d ever felt in a while, safer than the rest of the
