Kelvin’s POV
The echo of Diana’s footsteps followed me like a shadow, soft against the polished marble floors of my family’s mansion, a place that had always felt more like a mausoleum than a home. Cold. Hollow. Endless. The vaulted ceilings loomed above us like silent watchers, and the walls stretched out in all directions, heavy with secrets.
Diana walked with her arms crossed tightly over her chest, her gaze fixed somewhere ahead but seeing nothing. Sunlight slanted through the stained-glass windows, casting fractured halos of crimson and gold onto the stone walls. But she didn’t look up. Not once.
I tried to break the silence, to fill it with words that might draw her back to me.
“This is the gallery,” I said, gesturing toward a hallway of ancestral portraits, their eyes staring do
