Aurelia's breath froze in her throat.
Malion sat in the inn's common room as though it were his personal throne hall....silent, carved in shadow, every line of him honed with the kind of stillness that made the world itself seem hesitant to move.
Not a single soul lingered around him. The tables were empty. The hearth was unlit. The morning light slanted across the boards, catching in the faint frost of his gaze.
Malion-kind-of quiet.
Aurelia's first wild thought was that she was still dreaming. The second was that the dream had become a nightmare. The third...sharpest.....was that she had nowhere left to run.
He stood the moment she stepped off the last stair.
Aurelia flinched.
He didn't speak. He simply walked toward her....slow, deliberate, each step echoing more than it should in the strange hush of the inn. Aurelia backed away instinctively until her shoulder blades struck the wall. Trapped.
Her pulse hammered painfully fast.
