The Blackwood estate was silent at this hour, the kind of silence that pressed against Avri's eardrums like a physical weight. Moonlight streamed through the arched windows of the grand hallway, casting long shadows that stretched like grasping fingers across the polished hardwood. He moved soundlessly, his socked feet making no noise as he approached his grandfather's study—the one place in this damned house that had always been forbidden to him.
The door was slightly ajar.
Avri paused, his hand hovering over the knob. He hadn't meant to eavesdrop. Hadn't meant to do anything but grab the file he'd left in the adjacent sitting room. But the low murmur of voices stopped him cold.
"—never seen him like this," Marcus, his grandfather's beta, was saying. There was something unsettlingly wa
