Chapter : The Things We Inherit

The voice didn’t come again.

Not that night.

Not the next morning.

But it stayed with me, like an echo pressed into the back of my skull—familiar and foreign. Soft. Deadly. Alaric’s voice whispering from inside my own mind.

I didn’t tell Lucien.

Not because I didn’t trust him, but because I did. And I knew if I told him, he’d start looking at me differently. Like I was fragile. Cracked. Another ticking bomb in a long line of them.

So I buried it. I wrapped it in silence and pretended I still knew the difference between my own thoughts and someone else’s.

Leo’s...