Aurora waved her staff once more, and the room shifted.
The blood, the stench, the sticky film of iron that clung to the air — gone.
Even the faint meat-grit that had crept between the cracks of the floorboards dissolved into nothing. She made it clean, spotless, like it had never happened.
Atlas smiled faintly from his bed, tugged under the covers as if it was his own doing.
But it wasn't the cleanliness that unsettled her.
It was the quiet.
Her instincts whispered that something here was wrong — the wrongness was subtle, silk-thin, yet persistent. She had lived long enough to know hell rarely offered anything without a price. Here, in the pit where willpower was a currency, there were no shortcuts, no gifts freely given. Everything was bought, everything was paid for, in equal weight.
But… maybe that was the part of her that remembered hell too vividly.
Maybe that was the part of her that couldn't accept ease when it came.
