Novel-novel oleh Tayyaba

The letter was already in my room when I lit the candle. I hadn’t heard a knock. One moment I was alone with the rain against the window; the next, an envelope waited on my desk as if it had grown there. Black wax, sealed with a crest of two ravens circling a red moon. My name—Miss Evelyn Blackthorne—written in a hand that knew too much about me. I broke the seal. You seek truths the living won’t name. Come to Whitestone Castle before the full moon wanes. At the foot of the Carpathians you will be met. The road is long. The night longer. — V.D. The signature looked wrong—too polite for the legend that haunted half the world. If he had written, he wouldn’t have hidden behind initials. Still, curiosity has never been something I manage well. Before dawn my trunk was packed. I left a note for my landlady—“two weeks at most”—and boarded the first east-bound train. I told myself I was chasing folklore, not a man. By the third night, the mountains rose like black teeth. I stepped off

The darkness was total.I froze, hand outstretched, candle useless. The whisper still lingered in my ear—Welcome home—and it felt less like a greeting than a claim.My heartbeat filled the silence. One breath, two… then the candles flared back to life by themselves, flames steady and vertical, no smoke. The paper on the table was gone.I swallowed hard. “All right,” I whispered. “Show yourself, then.”Nothing answered—only the faint groan of timber shifting, as if the castle exhaled. I set the candle back in its holder and retraced my steps through the library door. The corridor seemed longer than before, as if the house had added a few feet while I wasn’t looking.By the time I reached my room, dawn was breaking in a gray smear across the shutters. I collapsed into the chair by the fire, still fully dressed, and told myself I would write everything down in the morning. Instead, I slept.When I woke, sunlight had turned the edges of the curtains to gold. The castle was quiet except fo

I should have run. Any sensible person would have slammed the wall shut and prayed it stayed that way.But curiosity isn’t sensible, and I’d travelled too far to stop at a whisper.“Where are you?” I called.The voice came again—smooth, low, threaded with amusement.“Closer than you think.”I stepped toward the crack. The air that leaked through was colder than the room behind me and smelled faintly of rain on iron. The seam widened a little, just enough to let me see candlelight glinting off stone steps that spiralled down.“Evelyn,” the voice coaxed. “You wanted truth.”My candle sputtered but held. I told myself that if the stairs led nowhere, I could always come back. That lie was enough to move my feet.The passage was narrow, carved straight into the mountain’s bone. Each step sank deeper into cold. The walls breathed faintly, the same slow rhythm I’d felt last night—the pulse of the house itself.After a dozen turns, the passage opened into a chamber lit by three thin candles.

The words were gone, but I could still feel them in my chest, like ink drying beneath the skin.Don’t trust the servant.I stepped back from the mirror. Nothing moved except my pulse. The glass showed only me—my face too pale, my eyes too wide, the candlelight behind me stretching like claws. I told myself it was a trick. A reflection of fear, not of truth.The violin stopped. Silence rolled through the castle, thick as fog. Then the air shifted—the faintest tremor, as if the house had turned its head to listen again.I needed daylight. I fled the library, closing the door behind me. The corridor was brighter than I expected; the morning sun managed to find a thin slit of window near the stairs. It looked ordinary enough to make me laugh under my breath. Ordinary—what a beautiful word.Elias was waiting at the landing.“You shouldn’t walk the halls before breakfast,” he said softly. “The house hasn’t decided what it is yet.”I stared at him too long. “Did you move the mirr

The flames bent sideways. The books rattled. The air thinned until every breath felt borrowed.Elias stepped between us.“Let her go,” he said again, steadier this time, as if he’d rehearsed the line alone in empty corridors.Dracula didn’t move. His hand still circled my wrist, not cruel, simply final. “You have served long enough to know when the house has chosen.”“It hasn’t chosen,” Elias said. “It’s hungry.”“Both can be true.” Dracula glanced at the open book on the table. The ink still crawled across the page, forming and reforming the same sentence: The servant defies the master.“Don’t,” I said—uncertain which of them I meant. “Please.”The word made them both look at me.Elias’s expression softened, a single, unguarded instant. He had always arranged rooms to make them easier to endure. He looked at me now as if deciding which burden he could lift without asking my permission. “Evelyn,” he said quietly, “step back.”Dracula’s grip eased a fraction, enough that I could have s