The Ravaryn Mansion.

Chapter 5

I didn't move for a long time after the voice went quiet.

Just stood there pressed against the wall in my bare feet, water forgotten, listening to footsteps fade down some hallway I didn't know the shape of yet, in a house I was apparently already inside of according to someone who'd needed to confirm it. *She's inside the mansion now.* Like I was a delivery. Like someone had been expecting me to arrive and was checking a box off a list.

I didn't sleep after that. I don't think I'd really been sleeping before it, either.

---

Morning came anyway, the way it does even when you don't want it to, and I made myself go down for breakfast because staying in that room felt worse than facing whatever waited outside it.

The dining room was already full. Isabella Cauis stepmother at one end of the table, smiling at me over her coffee cup in a way that didn't reach anywhere close to her eyes. Adrian, Cauis cousin across from her, watching me the way you'd watch something you were deciding whether to be amused by or annoyed by. And Valen at the head, of course, not even looking up from his paper, like my presence in the room was already assumed, already accounted for.

"Seraphine." Isabella said my name like she was trying out a new dress. "How lovely. We were beginning to wonder if you'd hide in your room all week."

"I wasn't hiding."

"Of course not." Her smile didn't move. "You must be exhausted. Weddings are so draining."

Adrian said nothing. He just watched me pour coffee I didn't actually want, with the kind of attention that made my skin feel too tight for my body.

Nobody asked how I'd slept. Nobody asked if I needed anything. I sat through twenty minutes of conversation that moved around me like water around a rock, and by the time I excused myself, I still didn't know a single true thing about any of them.

---

I went looking for a library, or a garden, or anywhere I could sit without someone smiling at me like they knew something I didn't. I found a hallway instead, one I hadn't been shown, lined with portraits going back generations by the look of the clothing changing frame to frame.

I stopped at one near the end.

A family, formally posed, the kind of portrait rich people commission instead of just taking a photo like everyone else. Valen, younger. A woman I didn't recognize. Two boys — one of them Caius, unmistakable even as a child by that same unreadable set to his mouth.

And a third figure, standing slightly apart from the rest of them, scratched out so completely the canvas showed through underneath. Not faded. Not damaged by time. Scratched, deliberately, again and again, like whoever did it had needed to make sure that face could never come back.

I leaned in closer, my fingers almost touching the frame, trying to make sense of a shape that refused to give me anything.

"You shouldn't be in this hallway."

I spun around. Caius was closer than I'd expected, close enough that I hadn't heard him arrive at all, which unsettled me more than the portrait did.

"Who is this?" I nodded at the ruined face. "Someone scratched this out. On purpose."

"It doesn't matter."

"It clearly matters to someone."

He reached past me and lifted the portrait off the wall before I could stop him, holding it against his side like he was removing evidence from a scene. "Don't come to this part of the house again."

"That's not an answer, Caius."

"It's the only one you're getting." His voice had gone tight, controlled in a way that felt different from his usual coldness — this wasn't indifference. This was something being held down hard enough that I could see the effort of it. "Please. Just — not this. Not yet."

*Not yet.* Like there was a version of this where he did explain. Just not now. Not to me, not standing in a hallway with a scratched-out face between us.

I didn't push. Something in the set of his jaw told me pushing wouldn't get me anywhere except further away from whatever answer actually existed.

---

I woke sometime near three in the morning to the sound of footsteps outside my door.

Not loud. Careful, almost, the kind of quiet that comes from someone trying not to be heard rather than someone with nothing to hide. I lay still for a second, heart going too fast, telling myself it was nothing, a staff member, the house settling.

Then it happened again. Closer.

I got up before I'd fully decided to, crossed the cold floor, and opened the door with my pulse loud in my own ears.

The hallway was empty.

Except it wasn't, not all the way down — Caius stood at the far end, near the top of the staircase, unmoving, like he'd been standing there a while. He didn't come toward me. He didn't explain himself. He just looked at me across that long stretch of hallway, and something passed between us that I didn't have a word for yet.

I didn't ask him anything. I don't know why. Maybe because some part of me already understood I wasn't going to get an answer, or maybe because some other part of me didn't actually want to break whatever this was by naming it.

I stepped back inside. Closed the door.

Through the crack under it, I watched his shadow finally move, unhurried, and disappear down the stairs.

---

A note was waiting under my door when I woke up.

No envelope. Just a single folded square of paper, slid there sometime while I'd finally, briefly, managed to sleep. My hands weren't steady when I picked it up. I don't know why I already knew, before I even opened it, that it wasn't going to be nothing.

One line. Handwriting I didn't recognize, pressed hard enough into the

paper that I could feel the letters on the other side.

*If you want to stay alive, don't fall in love with your husband.*