Chapter 161

• Lusia
• A velvet drape closed the night over my chambers, with a heavy air, saturated with the scent of lavender oil mingled with faint musk from the aged wood. This narrow bed, wrapped with gray linens, creaked under these small movements; the mattress, thin but lamentably familiar, frayed the edges in itself from a past too littered with sleeplessness.
• There was one, solitary window allowing a scythe-thin, pale, and cold sliver of the moonlight to cleave across the stone floor. At that time, I could find slumber with a body exhausted from the day's training and my wolf a flicking, ineffectively feeble spark within.