That morning arrived cloaked in a suffocating haze, days after the disastrous rally, after the confession Mara had ripped from her soul, and the night Igor returned twisted into something unholy.
The fog outside was not the romantic sort, the kind that drapes the countryside in soft mystery.
No, this was something else entirely. A sickly, clinging mist crawled over the estate like a parasite, slinking across the leaded glass like fingers searching for cracks in the sanctuary.
It blurred the harsh, aristocratic geometry of the Lennox manor, dulling its grandeur, and turned the estate's proud silhouette into a looming wraith. But even this gray veil offered no mercy. It could not hide the rot beneath.
Inside, Mara Lennox lay trapped in her bed like a pinned insect, her eyes wide and sleepless. The sheets, once a comfort, now felt like cold, foreign skin brushing against hers. Her mind refused to quiet.
Over and over, it conjured Igor as he had appeared that night, his eyes empty, voice not his own, mouth forming words that should never belong to him.
A prayer twisted into something demonic. And that blotch of red, blooming across his chest like a wound carved into her memories. Every time the scene played again in her mind, it stripped another layer from her, leaving her shaking and hollow.
There was no comfort in pretending anymore. Something terrible had happened, and she was fearful of what was to come.
In the hush before dawn, Mara moved barefoot through the manor's shadowed halls, and the silence felt like the house was holding its breath. The usual warmth of the jutan rugs now rasped beneath her feet, every texture foreign, unwelcome.
The estate, once vibrant with footsteps, voices, and carefully maintained illusions, had gone still, hollow, like a mausoleum dressed in wealth.
Ancestral portraits loomed from the walls, their painted eyes glinting with judgment, and even the soft spill of sunlight seemed to accuse rather than comfort.
The mansion had once felt like a fortress. Now it pressed in like a tomb, every corridor echoing with ghosts, not strangers, but memories. Her failures. Her children's pain, and an awful, creeping truth she could no longer outrun.
Mara hesitated outside the half-open door to the servants' wing, darkness seeping from within. The silence of the house pressed in, and she could hear her heartbeat. She couldn't make herself cross the threshold.
Not after what she'd seen, Igor's blank stare, the blood, the voice that wasn't quite his. He wasn't just a servant anymore. He was a fracture in the world she thought she controlled.
He wasn't just a servant anymore. He was a rupture in reality, a shadow bleeding through the cracks. Crossing that threshold wasn't just stepping into a room; it was stepping into a void where something wrong waited, patient and ravenous.
Intellectually, Mara always knew the White Angels were a threat, a dangerous cult with ruthless methods and radical ideals.
She'd pored over espionage reports from hired hands, listened to warnings from friends, but none of that prepared her for how profoundly they'd insinuated her family. It started quietly, almost unnoticed, with Maisie.
The cult preyed on her susceptibility, threading illusions of hope and salvation to ensnare her.
Now, Mara, despite all her care and caution, found herself fighting to pull Maisie back from their grip. Even Igor, a calm servant she once trusted, had become a pawn in their cruel game.
Swallowed by a desperate, burning need to reclaim what they'd stolen, Mara's fury surged; pure, fierce, and relentless.
The weight of failure crushed Mara, a suffocating cloak of regret. She had failed Igor, not just in protecting him from the fate that had claimed him, but in missing the quiet signs of his suffering.
Her blindness to his pain was a fatal mistake in a world that preyed on weakness. And Maisie, fragile and lost, had suffered too, pushed away when she needed comfort most, met with impatience instead of understanding.
The deepest wound was her blindness to the real threat, the creeping darkness gathering beyond the estate's walls, poised to devour everything she loved.
The morning wore on slowly, the thick murk that clung stubbornly to the grounds showing no sign of lifting. Pale, shivering, light filtered weakly through the solarium's glass roof, casting long, fragile shadows over the plants inside.
The air had a scent of damp earth and foliage, dense and suffocating. Mara sat rigid in a creaking wicker chair, surrounded by silent palms and ferns that seemed like watchful sentinels offering neither comfort nor mercy.
She fought to summon more than just physical strength. This call wasn't merely a conversation; it was a reckoning. To face Maisie once more, not with the furious storm that had erupted between them, but with a fragile hope that some understanding might still flicker in the silence.
The sting of the slap she'd delivered mornings before weighed on her conscience, a desperate act born of fear, not hate. Shame clung to her bones, cold and unrelenting. Despite their conversation in this very solarium the night before, she thought Maisie would never forgive her.
That possibility hovered like a shadow, but it was dwarfed by the dark urgency now consuming Mara: the relentless need to protect her daughter, no matter the cost.
The antique landline rang in the sitting room connected to her solarium, loud, jarring, impossibly real. It sat like a black monolith on the short table, a relic from an era of scheduled calls and secrets whispered under breath.
Under Mara's trembling hand, the phone felt foreign, almost hostile. Its weight was immense and too real. When she finally lifted the receiver, a burst of static hissed in her ear, a wild, shapeless noise that mirrored the chaos writhing inside her.
Her knuckles turned white around the Bakelite handle, clinging as if the smooth plastic could anchor her to something solid. But nothing felt solid.
Her heart pounded in her chest like a creature trying to escape, each beat stoking the dread knotting in her gut. The hum on the line wasn't just interference; it sounded like breathing. Listening.
The line clicked.
Then came a voice, smooth, feminine, and cold as poured mercury. It didn't rise or fall like natural speech; every syllable was deliberate, measured, as if carved from glass. The kind of voice that had been trained, sculpted, and sterilized of warmth. No fear. No doubt. Just a flawless, practiced calm that oozed control. Mara felt her spine go rigid.