Aveline
The sunlight crawling across the floor of Matteo’s suite felt like an insult. It was too bright, too golden, a mocking contrast to the heavy, suffocating silence that had settled between these four walls.
I hadn’t moved from the bed in sixteen hours.
I was still draped in the black silk robe he’d forced me into—a garment that felt like a second skin, slick and cold. I stared at the door Kai had pounded on the night before. Matteo had vanished into the hallway for hours, returning in the grey smudge of dawn with a look on his face that I couldn't decipher. He hadn't looked at me with his usual sharp, biting hatred. He had looked at me as if I were a puzzle he was tempted to smash just so he didn't have to solve it.
Then, he had sat back in that armchair. And the silence began.
