2025-09-16 15:12:04
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Chapter Seventy-Four – Ash and Silence
The world smelled of smoke. Not the clean kind that rose from candles or firewood, but the acrid, ruinous scent of something gutted from the inside out. The European mansion — their supposed refuge — had become a skeleton of itself. The stone walls stood blackened and fractured, the windows shattered, the air thick with soot and the faint hiss of dying embers. The fire had burned fast and silent, too deliberate to be an accident. Lana stood in the gravel drive, arms wrapped around herself, watching a curl of smoke drift from what had been the east wing. The morning light turned the haze gold, almost beautiful — if she ignored the stench of ruin beneath it. Her fingers still smelled faintly of old paper and ash. Behind her, Grey’s voice cut through the silence, steady and low. “Keep your distance from the beams. The floor’s giving way near the study.” He stepped out of the smoke, his shirt streaked with soot, his jaw set in grim concentration. Even now, he was composed — moving t
Chapter Seventy-Three — The House of Echoes
Morning came softly, but not kindly. Light crept into the mansion like it had to fight its way through old dust and thicker shadows. The air smelled faintly of smoke, though the hearth had long gone cold. Lana stirred on the couch in the study, her body aching from sleep that hadn’t healed. Across from her, Grey leaned against the desk, arms folded, watching the empty fireplace as though waiting for something to rise from the ashes. She didn’t need to ask if he had slept. The dark beneath his eyes told her everything. The ledger still lay between them — closed now, but not forgotten. Every time her gaze brushed its worn leather spine, her stomach tightened. The night before had left her raw, her mind spinning with numbers and memories and the haunting mark of 47-R. Her number. Her past. Her proof that the life she’d lived wasn’t entirely her own. Outside, the wind pressed against the glass, rattling the edges of the old windowpanes. Somewhere in the mansion, a door creak
Chapter Seventy-Two – Morning Ashes
Dawn came reluctantly.The sky outside Grey’s mansion bled pale silver through the high windows, light so thin it barely dared to touch the room. The fire in the grate had gone to ash, a bed of gray flecked with dying embers.Lana woke with her cheek pressed against the edge of the desk. The ledger sat closed beneath her hand, as if her body had refused to let go even in sleep.Her back ached. Her neck was stiff. But worse than either was the hollow ache of knowing she had spoken her fears aloud, let them seep into the silence where someone else could hear them.Her eyes cracked open.Grey sat not far away.He hadn’t taken the chair opposite, nor the one beside her, but instead had claimed the windowsill, one leg braced against the frame, arms crossed. The morning light carved his face in pale lines, sharpening every angle into something austere.She had half expected him to be gone — to have left her in that raw state, her secrets spilled like blood. But no. He had stayed.And worse:
Chapter Seventy-One – What Grey Saw
The ledger weighed heavy beneath her palms, as though it held down more than just parchment. She pressed harder, as if force alone could smother the number scratched into its margins. But her arms trembled, her breath rasped, and her resolve thinned with every second she sat in the dark.The candle beside her had burned low. Its flame threw frantic shadows across the library walls, distorting the shelves into jagged teeth, the velvet drapes into figures leaning closer.She whispered again, unable to stop herself.“Elana Rey.”“Forty-seven R.”The words twisted together until they no longer sounded like language but like the hiss of some unseen serpent coiled inside the ledger.She didn’t hear the door creak.Grey’s footsteps were soundless — years of training honed into habit. He paused just inside the threshold, watching.From the doorway he saw her bent over the desk, her shoulders taut, her fingers clutching the edges of the book with white-knuckled desperation. The candlelight pai
Chapter Seventy – The Number in the Dark
The candle guttered low, spilling a wavering halo across the ledger’s brittle pages. Shadows leaned in from the corners of the library as if to watch, their silence thick enough to press against Lana’s skin.She couldn’t move. Not yet. Her eyes remained fixed on the margins where the numbers curled faint and merciless: 47R.The memory refused to let her breathe.The thin plastic biting her wrist. The cheap ink bleeding into pale skin. The girl with braids, tugging her own band with a scowl, telling her, “We’re just numbers here.”Lana’s stomach clenched so hard she had to grip the table to stay upright.Not here. Not now. She had spent years burying that place, smothering it until even the smells and sounds felt like fading dreams. But the ledger had dragged it back into the open, carving it into permanence. This wasn’t her imagination. The same number she once carried like a brand was now written in the margins of a book centuries older than her life.She snapped the ledger closed. T
Chapter Sixty-Nine – The Hollow Name
The fire had burned low, leaving only a few orange embers crackling in the hearth. Grey hadn’t pressed her with questions, hadn’t pushed her to explain the shadows clinging to her face when she closed the ledger. He had simply drawn the curtains shut again, offered her the kind of silence that felt deliberate, not careless.It was a strange gift — space.Lana thought she should feel relief. Instead, it hollowed her out.When Grey finally excused himself, retreating down the hall with that steady stride of his, she lingered in the library. The heavy book still sat on the table, the dust it had coughed up earlier settled back into stillness. Its weight seemed to bend the air around it, like gravity itself leaned harder where the ledger lay.She couldn’t bear to touch it again. Not yet.Instead, she slipped out into the corridor. The mansion carried itself differently at night — too large, too silent, every corner brimming with echoes that weren’t there in daylight. The sconces glowed fa
