The den had never been so quiet.
A heavy hush cloaked the corridors like a second skin, broken only by the low crackling of distant torches and the occasional creak of stone settling deep underground. Time crawled in that silence. The den breathed—barely—but every breath felt borrowed.
Evanna had been asleep for seven days.
Seven long, agonizing days where Thorne hadn’t once left her side. Not even to eat. Not to rest. Not even to grieve the thoughts that had started to devour him from the inside out.
She lay on his bed wrapped in the softest furs they could find, her chest barely rising and falling. Her skin, once warm and golden, had taken on a moonlit pallor. Her hair—so dark it used to soak in shadows—now flickered like dying embers in a hearth, orange and copper strands spilling o
