{Elias's First POV. 5 days after the exchange in the forest.}
The late afternoon light stretched long across my father's study, turning the polished floors into bands of gold and shadow that shifted with every passing moment. It would have been peaceful on any other day, but now the room felt suffocating, crowded not with people, but with the weight of everything I could not solve.
Five days.
Five days since Seraphina had been taken into that forest, and every attempt to reach her had ended the same way—with the trees closing ranks like silent sentinels, with the paths twisting into dead ends, with the forest itself rejecting us as though we were intruders in something sacred. Which in fact it was, if it is where the fae land is.
