Isabella's point of view
The halls of the old manor echoed with silence, the kind that wasn't born from peace, but from the kind of stillness that lingered after something terrible had already happened. I moved slowly, my fingertips trailing the worn wallpaper, eyes flickering with the last of the moonlight leaking through shattered glass panes. There was something haunting about how it all felt familiar and foreign in the same breath—a house that had once been a sanctuary now reduced to memory and shadow.
My chest rose and fell with uneven rhythm, the wounds I carried not only physical, but stitched into the very fabric of my spirit. Every step down the corridor felt heavier than the last, as if the weight of what I had seen, what I had lost, pulled me toward the ground. But I didn't stop. I couldn't.
Because the crying had returned.
