The moonlight still mocked her, silver and merciless, as Isabella slipped from her chamber. The vast corridor stretched like the ribcage of a sleeping beast, its silence both suffocating and strangely alive. Her bare steps on the cold stone felt like whispers of treachery—hers, or the house's, she could not tell.
She drew her shawl tighter, her lips parting with a fragile sigh.
"Oh, Theodore is not here… gone like a phantom again." Her voice was soft, tinged with something between resentment and reluctant yearning. "Does he vanish to taunt me? Or does the darkness itself devour him, while leaving me with its bones?"
Her words bled into the emptiness, and only the drafts answered back, curling around her like unseen claws. She pressed her fingers to the wall as though it would steady her, though the stones were colder than her own pulse.
Unbeknownst to her, far from this narrow stretch of shadow, Theodore stood in the great hall—the largest artery of the Crescent Blood Pack's manor. The chamber yawned with echoing silence, its pillars clawing at the ceiling, its air so thick with secrecy that even the moonlight dared not enter fully.
There he stood, tall, unmoving, his gaze fixed upon nothing and everything at once. His voice, when it came, was a rasp to himself, a knife turned inward.
"Will she stir restlessly when she finds the bed empty?" he muttered, his tone a dark mockery of tenderness. "Or will she curl into the hollow I leave behind, pretending she does not ache when I am gone? Isabella… my fragile storm. Does her heart quiver for me in my absence, or does she, in her secret treason, pray that I never return?"
His mouth curved, cruel and humorless, though it bore the shape of a smile.
"Perhaps she wakes and whispers, 'Thank heavens, the monster has left me in peace.'" He laughed low, dark, the sound swallowed instantly by the hall's cavernous belly. "But peace is only an illusion… and I will never grant her that mercy."
He dragged a hand across his face, fingers pressing against his eyes as though to cage the torment within. Yet when he lowered it, his gaze gleamed with something murderous, something feral.
"If she dares to believe my absence makes her free, then I shall return twice as merciless. Let her dream of dawn without me—let her believe she can breathe again. For when I return, I will remind her that even her air belongs to me."
The hall seemed to shudder with his words, as if the stones themselves remembered blood. Somewhere above, the faintest laugh drifted down—Isabella's. She had spoken to herself in the corridor, not knowing her every sigh could awaken the beast in him.