EMMA
I knew better.
That was the cruelest part of it—not ignorance, not accident, not confusion. I knew exactly what I was doing as I stood in the shadowed corridor, staring at the reinforced door at the end of the hall.
The one Gabriel had forbidden me from touching.
The horn had stopped an hour ago, but the estate hadn’t relaxed. If anything, the tension had sunk deeper, settling into the walls, the floors, the very air. People moved softly now. Conversations were clipped. Every window had been shuttered. Every exterior light burned bright, throwing long spears of gold across the snow.
And Gabriel had vanished.
Not to his penthouse. Not to the common rooms. Gone in the way people only disappeared when something demanded all of them.
I paced my cabin for nearly twenty minutes befor
