The rain in the North didn’t just fall; it eroded. It bit into the gray stone of Blackwood Manor until the house looked like a jagged tooth rising from the cliffside. Inside, the silence was heavy, broken only by the rhythmic tick-tock of the grandfather clock in the hall—a countdown of the hours Elara no longer owned.

She was twenty-two, but in the reflection of the polished silver, she looked like a ghost. Her father’s gambling debts had been bought by Silas Vane, a man whose reputation was as cold as the marble floors she scrubbed. She wasn't a servant in the traditional sense; she was a physical asset, a living piece of collateral.