Irina’s POV

Nothing.

Just the wall. The pale stone. The sconce light trembling slightly in some draft I couldn’t identify. The recessed doorway, flush and dark and empty, exactly the way it always was.

I stood with my back pressed to the opposite wall and breathed.

One second. Two. Three.

*It’s nothing,* I told myself. *You checked. It’s nothing.*

My heartbeat said otherwise.

I peeled myself off the wall. Adjusted my grip on the strap of my cardigan where I’d bunched it in both fists without noticing. Let go. Smoothed the fabric.

*Keep walking.*

I kept walking.

---

The corridor stretched ahead — thirty feet, maybe a little more, curving gently toward the junction that branched left to the residential wing. My room was four minutes from here, maybe five. Down the junction, up half a flight of stairs, third door on the right. I knew this route in my sleep by now. I’d walked it a hundred times.

I walked it now.

My footsteps sounded too loud. The stone floor threw the sound back up at me, slightly hollow, slightly wrong — like the corridor was commenting on every step I took. I tried to place my feet more softly. That only made it worse, the careful silence of it somehow more conspicuous than just walking normally.

The footstep came back.

One. Behind me. The same deliberate weight as before, the same measured interval, as if whoever made it had been counting my steps and choosing the moment.

I stopped.

Silence.

Every nerve in my body was screaming. I could feel my pulse in my fingertips, in my temples, in the back of my throat. The ventilation hummed. Somewhere outside, very far away, someone shouted a drill command and it carried through stone and glass and open air and reached me as barely a sound at all.

Nothing else.

*Echo,* I thought again. I’d thought it before. I was thinking it again now because the alternative was something I didn’t want to name.

I turned around slowly.

Empty corridor. Both directions.

The recessed doorway was twenty feet behind me now, back around the curve and out of sight. Nothing moved. Nothing breathed. The sconce lights were perfectly still — no drafts, then, no shaking flames, no shadows dancing wrong.

I turned back around.

*Keep walking.*

---

I walked faster.

Six feet from the junction.

The footstep came again.

Two, this time. And closer.

My pace broke. I lurched into a half-jog before I’d consciously decided to, my shoulder nearly clipping the wall as I rounded the corner into the junction, and I breathed hard through my nose and forced my feet back down to something that wasn’t a run and I didn’t stop, I kept moving, left turn, stairs—

The stairs.

I hit the first step too fast and caught myself on the banister, fingers locking around it. Climbed. One flight, half a flight, the landing — brighter here, two sconces instead of one, an arched window letting in the last of the afternoon gray — and then the upper corridor, my corridor, the doors I recognized, the runner of dark carpet I’d memorized the pattern of over weeks of walking back and forth between my room and the dining hall and the courtyard and everywhere else.

Third door on the right.

I could see it.

I was almost there.

I broke into a full run.

The door — fifteen feet — ten — I fumbled in the pocket of my cardigan for the key card and it wasn’t there, it was in my other pocket, I jammed my hand into the other pocket and caught it between my fingers, eight feet, five—

A rush of air.

The key card hit the floor.

A hand — massive, iron-strong — came from behind and clamped over my mouth so hard my head snapped back. My scream died before it left my throat, collapsed into nothing against the solid wall of his palm. My feet left the ground for a second — just a second, just enough to understand that whatever happened next was completely outside my control — and then I was shoved, hard, into the wall beside my door, held there, both of us still, his body a wall of pressure behind me and his hand a vice over the bottom half of my face.

I couldn’t move.

I tried. My hands flew up to his forearm and pulled with everything I had, nails dragging across skin, and nothing happened. He didn’t flinch. He didn’t shift. He just held me there against the wall like I weighed nothing, like my struggling was something he was barely registering.

My lungs burned. I was breathing in short, useless bursts through my nose, and each inhale pulled in the scent of him — cold stone, sweat, something chemical, something underneath that was familiar in a way that made my stomach clench before my brain had finished the thought—

*I know this smell.*

I knew this smell.

I knew it the way you know something that lived in a nightmare. The way you know the creak of a specific floorboard in a dark house you grew up in. Not from memory you chose to keep — from memory that kept you. Against your will. In the middle of the night when you’d rather be anywhere else.

My whole body went rigid.

He felt it. His grip didn’t loosen, but something shifted — a slight tilt of his head, cheek nearly touching my temple, breath warm and slow against the side of my face.

"Easy," he breathed. Very quietly. Like a secret.

I wasn’t screaming. I couldn’t. But every muscle I had was shaking — not with cold, not with exertion — with the specific, bone-deep terror of recognizing a threat you thought you’d left behind, the kind that makes your wolf scream even when she can barely make a sound anymore, the kind that tells you, very clearly, that everything you thought was safe was never safe at all.

The corridor was empty.

No one coming. No voices. No footsteps from anyone else.

I was alone with him.

His breath moved against my ear again, low and almost conversational, the way someone talks when they want to make sure you hear every single word.

I felt the goosebumps break across the back of my neck before he’d finished the first syllable.

Before my mind had even processed what I was hearing.

Before I had time to brace for it.

The words landed like a blade pressed flat against my throat — cold, deliberate, and completely sure of itself:

*"Sister... long time no see."*