[Emma's POV]
It began quietly.
A flutter of movement at the edges of my eyesight, as if a dying moth were flapping its wings against the fading glow. A shiver in the floorboards as I passed over them, a quiver so slight that I sensed it more in the roots of my teeth than in the soles of my feet.
The sort of things you might explain away in logic and reason, telling yourself it was the old house settling, the wind, your own weary brain—until the explanations are exhausted and you're left with nothing but the cold, stark reality.
By the second day, the mansion itself was breathing with me. Its enormous, still lungs rose and fell in a pace that mimicked my own. Each exhale made the thick velvet curtains rustle into a slow, ghostly waltz. Each wild heartbeat sent a corresponding shiver thr
