Lydia's Point Of View
The air in the study was so thick with the smell of expensive tobacco and impending doom that I felt like I was breathing through a woolen blanket. The man across from us… this Silvestro, this "fossil" who looked like he could snap a man's neck while reciting poetry, didn't move.
He just sat there, tilting his head with the slow, deliberate curiosity of a predator watching two mice dance in his cage. Every second of his silence felt like an eternity, each tick of the grandfather clock in the corner marking another moment we might not survive.
I tried to focus on something, anything, to ground myself… the ornate molding on the ceiling, the leather-bound volumes lining the walls, but my eyes kept returning to him, drawn like a moth to a deadly flame.
