The air in the Vance estate felt poisoned.

Leo sat at the heavy oak desk in his training room, the shadows of the late afternoon stretching across the floorboards. The house was utterly silent, save for the distant, rhythmic ticking of the grandfather clock in the hallway. It was the same clock El

The High Council chambers were a cavern of suffocating silence, built of dark marble and vaulted ceilings that trapped the cold. There was no warmth left in the room, nor in the city, nor in Kaelen Thorne’s chest.

In the center of the obsidian floor, stripped of the stolen silks and custom gowns s