I leaned against the mahogany headboard, the lines of the book in my hand blurring into a meaningless smear of ink. I was trying to lose myself in someone else's romance, but my mind was a chaotic labyrinth, haunted by the ghost of Varg's voice.
"You were like a breath of air I took..." he had said. Those words were still suspended in the damp, heavy air of the room, clinging to every molecule of oxygen I pulled into my lungs. It was an admission that tasted like honey and felt like a chokehold.
Just as the silence began to feel like a physical weight, the door creaked open with the delicate, rhythmic rattle of a silver tray. When I saw the figure gliding into the room, I wasn't met with a simple servant. I was struck by a kind of purity—a supernatural, terrifying symmetry that I hadn't encountered even on the most elite runways of magazines or at the most glittering galas of the city's billionaires.
