Elena’s POV

On the way to the exhibition venue, I finally noticed something was different.

The two scrutinizing gazes that had followed me since morning—sticky, deliberate, unmistakably hostile—were gone. It wasn’t until they vanished that I realized how tightly I’d been holding myself together. The tension I hadn’t consciously acknowledged loosened from my shoulders, and I took a deeper breath than I had all day.

The jewelry exhibition was held in a cultural museum tucked away in ...