Page 197 of Without a Trace

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His smile was the kind that didn’t reach his eyes. “Someone always burns.”

Scarlett

The manor breathed around me.

The walls weren’t just old—they were alive. The stone pulsed with heat in places and chilled my skin in others. My footsteps echoed back slower than they should’ve, like the halls were memorizing me. Or testing me.

I didn’t know where I was going. I just walked.

A staircase curved downward like it had been carved from bone. I followed it. I didn’t ask why.

Every breath I took felt like dust and something else—something metallic, blood. Or memory.

The air was too quiet. No servants. No guards. No Brielle. Just this place and me and something waiting in the dark.

I reached a door near the end of the hall. It opened like it had been expecting me.

Inside, the room was circular. A domed ceiling. Stone floor. A tapestry hung across the far wall—threadbare but intact.

A dagger. A veil. An eye.

And beneath them—three knots. Two pulled tight. One unraveled.

I stepped closer.

There was writing underneath it, faint but legible in the firelight.

The one who binds will break. The one who breaks will burn. The one who burns will beg. And the heir will choose.

I touched the stone below the tapestry and the world spun. My knees buckled.

And then I was somewhere else.

A dream—or maybe a memory that didn’t belong to me.

I was lying in a garden. Thorns climbing the wall behind me. Moonlight bleeding through the leaves. Someone whispering my name.

Trace. Alden.

I turned my head, and they were there. One on either side. Looking at me like I was salvation and damnation.

“You have to choose,” Alden said.

“You already did,” Trace whispered.

“No,” I said, voice cracking. “I didn’t.”

They touched my hands.

And everything caught fire.

I gasped awake on the stone floor of the tapestry room, my hands burning.

When I looked down, they weren’t marked. But I could still feel the heat.

The manor wasn’t just remembering me.

It was waking me up.

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