Velka POV
There was something distinctly humiliating about being haunted by one's own handwriting.
I sat at my desk, a half-melted candle flickering beside me, rereading the same brittle pages of the journal we'd found in the forbidden wing. The old leather cover smelled like grave dirt and forgotten oaths. Its script curled like smoke—flourished, fragmented, and occasionally written in blood.
Possibly. I hoped it was ink. Probably.
A dozen phrases repeated in my mind, etched into me like the burn of a rune:The child with the mirrored eyes.The sigil was marked before birth.Blood remembers what the mind forgets.
None of them had clear context. Most of them weren't even legible to anyone not half-vampire, half-scholar, and fully cursed with a curiosity that would absolutely be the death of me.
My fingers trailed across the last page, which was blank. Not torn out. Just waiting.
"You're losing it," I muttered under my breath.
