MAETHYS POV
I woke to the smell of bacon.
It took a moment for the unfamiliar comfort of it to register — the soft mattress beneath me, the muted sounds of a house already alive. Heather’s house. The second bedroom, tucked beneath the sloped roof on the second floor.
Mine.
For now.
I lay still for a few breaths, listening.
Footsteps below. The faint clatter of a pan. The low murmur of a voice I didn’t recognize, carried up through the floorboards like something domestic and unreal.
The ache settled in my chest almost immediately.
It wasn’t sharp. Not pain, exactly. Just a tightness — a pressure that made it a little harder to breathe, a little harder to ignore the quiet pull beneath my ribs. It had been there since Heather moved me in. It came and went without warning, leaving m
