Next morning…

The soft rustle of curtains brushing against each other was the first thing Thalia heard before her eyes fluttered open. Morning light spilled gently into the room, warm and golden, filtering through the tall glass windows of William’s Mansion. For a moment her vision blurred, dancing with the haze of sleep, and she instinctively blinked until everything sharpened into clarity.

She lay still, listening to the quiet hum of the house. A peaceful morning, a rare one, her body still carried the exhaustion of the previous night, not the draining kind, but the sort that came from feeling everything too deeply all at once. She had fallen asleep...