>>Ahin
The snow crunched under my boots, soft and steady like the sound of distant waves. I liked the cold. It cleared my head, gave shape to the strange fog that never quite left me. Around the duke's mansion, the world was muted in white—trees laced in frost, hedges bowed beneath snowfall, and the old iron fence half-buried in a drifting silence.
I kept walking, hands tucked into my coat, breath misting in the chill. Above, a few windows glowed softly with firelight, flickering yellow and gold against the deepening dusk.
And then, like a tether I couldn't see but always felt, my eyes drifted upward.
Her window.
