Novels by blissmorningstar85

The silence after Kael's question stretched longer than any gunfire had. Rowan opened his mouth, and nothing came. What was there to say? *I didn't know* sounded thin even inside his own head, a child's excuse offered up in a room full of men who dealt in nothing but consequences. "I don't know what that photograph is," he finally said. "I don't know who that man was. I don't know why my face is on a corkboard in your basement like I'm a — a *specimen.*" His voice cracked on the last word, and he hated it, hated that Kael would hear exactly how frightened he was. Kael didn't answer right away. He was still holding the photograph like it might bite him, silver eyes moving between it and Rowan's face, searching for the resemblance he clearly hadn't wanted to find and now couldn't unsee. The gap-toothed boy. The laughing eyes. Twenty years and an entire life buried between that photograph and the man standing in front of him, and somehow the bones of the same face were unmistakable

The mansion never truly slept. Even past midnight, sound moved through it in ways Rowan had learned to track without meaning to footsteps on marble two floors down, the soft click of a guard's radio, the faint hum of cameras swiveling on their mounts. Someone was always watching. He'd stopped finding that unsettling around day three. Now it was simply a fact of the building, like the cold that pooled in the east wing no matter how high the heat was set. Tonight, he intended to find out who was watching him from *inside* the walls, not just the hallway. He'd noticed it two nights ago a servant's eyes flicking to a specific point on the wall before catching themselves. A guard's patrol route that skipped one stretch of corridor entirely, like it wasn't worth walking past. Small things. The kind of things a person only noticed if they'd spent years learning to notice small things, and some part of Rowan that he still didn't fully understand had never stopped doing that, not even here.

The east wing was quieter than the rest of the estate. Too quiet, in a way that pressed against Rowan's ears as the guards led him through the dim corridor. Unlike the guest room he'd woken in two days ago — all crystal and morning light — this part of the mansion felt older, like it had been left to keep its own secrets. Portraits lined the walls, every face an Ashford, every pair of painted eyes seeming to track him as he passed. One stopped him cold. A boy, no older than ten, stood beside an older man in a tailored black suit. The resemblance was unmistakable even across however many years separated the boy from the man Rowan had come to know. But this boy was smiling — a real smile, unguarded, nothing like the careful stillness Rowan had learned to read on Kael's face. "What happened to you?" he whispered, before he could stop himself. "Keep moving." The guard's voice snapped him back, and he let himself be walked on. Hours passed in the room they'd given him, one that l

The question lingered in the cold night air. Who taught you how to escape? Rowan’s heartbeat stumbled, and his mind raced through a dozen lies, each weaker than the last. “I watch a lot of crime movies.” Kael’s expression didn’t change. “You mapped patrol routes. You counted my guards. You identified the blind spots in under twenty minutes.” He took one deliberate step closer, close enough now that Rowan could smell cedarwood and something colder underneath it. “Movies don’t teach that.” “I was trying to survive.” Kael searched his face for something — fear, guilt, the shape of a confession — and found instead a stubborn pair of hazel eyes that refused to look away. “…Interesting.” The word had barely left his mouth when the explosion hit. The ground shuddered beneath them. Glass rained from the mansion’s western wing, and a heartbeat later alarms tore through the estate, red emergency lights flooding the gardens in pulses. For the first time since Rowan had met him, Kael look

The Ashford Estate woke before sunrise. By six o’clock the servants were already polishing marble floors, preparing breakfast, tending to the gardens, and the guards were rotating shifts with the kind of precision that came from practice, not paranoia. Nothing happened in this house without Kael Ashford knowing. Or so everyone believed. Rowan sat on the edge of his bed, staring at breakfast he had no intention of eating. He wasn’t hungry. He was counting — every footstep in the hall, every shift in the guards’ positions, every creak the old floors gave up without meaning to. The mansion was a prison, however beautiful, and every prison had a weakness somewhere. He just had to find it before it found him first. A knock interrupted the count. The same housekeeper from yesterday let herself in with an armful of fresh towels. “My name is Mrs. Evelyn,” she said, setting them down. “You don’t have to keep calling me ma’am.” Rowan managed a small smile. “Thank you.” She glanced at the

Darkness lingered behind Rowan’s eyelids, and for a while that was all there was — a dull ache pounding behind his skull, and underneath it, the scent of cedarwood, leather, and something faintly metallic. Blood, maybe. His own. He forced his eyes open. The ceiling above him was ivory, carved with mouldings too ornate for anything but an old palace. A crystal chandelier caught the morning light and scattered it across the room in small, glittering pieces. For one disoriented second, he thought he might be dreaming. Then the alley came back. The gunshot. Kael. Rowan sat up too fast and hissed as pain lanced through his skull — a bandage had been wrapped neatly around the back of his head. Someone had treated him. That unsettled him more than if they’d simply left him to bleed. The room stretched out around him, all dark oak and floor-to-ceiling windows draped in charcoal curtains, a fireplace big enough to stand inside. Everything about it said wealth. Everything about it also sa