Lila's POV
I sat at one of the tables in the mansion's private library, surrounded by leather-bound books climbing all the way to the curved ceiling. Afternoon sun streamed through the stained-glass, painting the floorboards gold, but none of it touched my nerves. My history textbook was open in front of me, highlighter in hand, and I hadn't read a single sentence in over an hour.
I couldn't focus. My brain kept looping back to that shadow bending over Lucien's desk in the dark.
Say it with me, Lila. You. Are. Not. Crazy.
No matter what the computer logs said, no matter how clean the files looked — I knew what I saw. I wasn't some girl who imagined ghosts the second the power cut out. Growing up where I did, I trained my eyes to track movement in the dark, and that figure was real. The
