The night stretched long and merciless, but Isabella didn’t sleep.

She sat at the edge of her small guest bed, elbows on her knees, staring at the faint crack of moonlight slipping through the curtains. Every breath she took felt too loud, too shaky, too full of the nightmare she had just overheard.

Damon’s words.

Cassandra’s indifference.

The whisper of “buyers.”

They crawled under her skin like poison.

The house was quiet now ... too quiet. The kind of calm that settles after a ...