Scarlett’s POV

Peace settles like a careful lie.

It arrives quietly, slipping into the pack the way fog creeps across a valley—soft, silver, almost beautiful if you don’t look too closely. No alarms ring. No blood stains the stones. No shadows scream from the corners of my mind.

And that alone terrifies me.

I wake before dawn, breath shallow, heart racing as though I’ve been running. The room around me is still. Too still. The ancestral marks etched into the walls glow faintly, their ...