Third Person POV
The corridor was quiet.
Not the peaceful kind of quiet—the suffocating kind. The kind that settled deep in the bones, pressing against the skin like an unseen weight.
Bastian stood outside the chamber door, his fingers curled into tight fists at his sides. The scent of blood clung to him, thick and metallic, woven into the fabric of his clothes and seared into the crevices of his skin.
He could still hear the echoes of the dungeons in his head—the snap of bones, the guttural screams, the wet sound of flesh splitting beneath his claws. He had worn those moments like armor down there, unflinching, unshaken.
But here? Here, where the light from the chamber spilled in slivers beneath the door, where the faintest trace of her scent reached him, something inside him wavered
