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A chill goes up my spine.

Not fear, though… recognition.

"Vivienne," Lachlan warns, his arm tightening around my waist, his other hand dropping to the hilt of his sword.

"I'm fine," I breathe, unable to look away. "It's working."

The pooled shadow doesn't spill onto the table. Instead, it rises into the air between us, swirling in a vortex of cold air. The temperature in the library plummets instantly. Frost blooms in delicate, fern-like patterns across the polished surface of the mahogany pedestal.

The shadow stretches upward, expanding, resolving into shapes, into textures, into light.

And then the room around us dissolves.

We aren't standing in the library anymore.

Thirty-Two

Vivienne

We’re standing in an echo of someone’s memory, maybe the house’s itself.

The bookshelves around us are pristine, gleaming with fresh oil and lined with thousands of leather-bound tomes. A roaring fire burns in the massive stone hearth, casting dancing orange light across the parquet floor. Outside the high-arched windows, the sky is black, lit by the distant, horrifying flashes of magical artillery—fireballs exploding against shimmering, translucent barriers in the distance.

The Fall of House Midnight. Two hundred years ago.

Standing in the center of the room, right in front of the fireplace, is a woman.

My breath catches in my throat.

She isn't a ghost. She isn't a translucent, rattling phantom. She is an imprint, a memory preserved by the blood magic of the volvelle.

She is dressed in a dark, high-necked gown of midnight-blue velvet, so strikingly similar to the one I wore to the gala that for a dizzying second I feel like I'm looking into a funhouse mirror. Her dark hair is pulled back into an elegant knot, held fast by a silver hair stick shaped like a dagger. Her face is exhausted, wan.

And she looks like me.

She has my jawline. She has my high, stubborn cheekbones. She has the exact curve of my nose.

Beside me, Lachlan goes utterly motionless. "Lady Vivienne," he whispers, the name slipping from his lips like a prayer. "The Eleventh Head of House."

"She was named Vivienne?" I ask, my voice barely audible over the crackle of the phantom fire.

"Aye," Lachlan breathes, awe painting his rugged features. "She was the last to hold the house before the silence. My cousin served her, I only met her once, when she was young. I never… I never realized how much you look like her."

In the memory, the woman paces the floor in front of the hearth. Her hands are clenched into tight fists, her chest heaving as another distant explosion rattles the spectral windows.

Then, she stops.

She turns, facing the fluted pedestal—facing the exact spot where Lachlan and I are standing in the present. Her dark eyes, so hauntingly identical to my own, bore directly through the centuries, locking onto mine.

Her right hand rises.

Her thumb presses into the hollow above her collarbone, rubbing the skin in circles.

One. Two. Three.

A tear burns hot against my cheek. It wasn't a foster care habit. It wasn't a nervous tic born of neglect.

It was memory. It was blood answering blood across two centuries of silence.