Prologue

The North Mountains, Albania.

The mountain is breathing.

Fog rises and falls along its jagged spine, slow and heavy, like the lungs of something ancient. Wind howls through the northern peaks like the wail of a thousand tortured souls, tearing at the bruised twilight sky that presses down on the wild mountains like a suffocating shroud.

That is the first wrong thing Cassius notices.

Each rise of fog looks like a lung filling. Each fall, a slow, dying exhale. Snow drifts sideways, not down, as if the sky itself has lost direction. Pines loom like broken spears, their black tips vanishing into clouds.

Cassius moves uphill.

He doesn’t remember how he came here but as he moves his boots make no sound. The world is muffled, wrapped in thick, dead cotton. Even the wind feels strangled.

Then he smells it.

Metal.

Not fresh. Not sharp.

Old.

Blood that has already been forgiven by the cold.

“Cass…”

The voice is wrong. Too thin. Too far.

He turns.

The trees have changed.

They bend inward now, warped by ice and time, their dark spines curving to form a narrow corridor. The fog parts like a curtain drawn by invisible hands.

And there she is.

Elena.

Kneeling in the snow.

Her hair is dark with frost. Her college jacket hangs open, stiff and wrong on her shoulders. There is red at her throat, blooming through the white like a second, terrible flower.

“Lena,” he whispers.

His voice breaks the world.

The mountain exhales.

She lifts her head.

Her eyes are open—but they don’t see him. They stare past his face, past the trees, past the sky, as if something behind him matters far more.

Cassius runs.

The distance does not change.

Snow thickens around his legs, swallowing him to the knees, the waist, the ribs. Each step grows heavier, like the mountain is learning his weight, adjusting to keep him.

“Elena!” he shouts.

This time, she smiles.

It is not relief.

It is apology.

She reaches out to him. Her hand trembles in the frozen air. Cassius tries to move—but his arms are numb, locked, as if invisible ropes bind them. The harder he fights, the colder they become.

Suddenly, the wound in her throat opens.

Blood spills in a slow, dark ribbon, steaming where it meets the cold. It runs down her chest and into the snow, carving a thin red path that winds downhill—toward him.

He falls.

His knees strike the ground.

The snow is not snow.

It is blood.

Crimson. Warm. Smothering.

“No,” he breathes.

The fog surges back.

When it clears, she is no longer kneeling.

She is laid out on the ground.

Still.

Open-eyed.

Her skin is the wrong color for life.

Her body is half-buried in frost and stone, as if the mountain has already begun to claim her. One bare hand rests outside the emergency sheet, fingers curled, nails broken.

Cassius crawls to her.

Each movement feels like tearing through glass.

Her skin is marble.

Too smooth. Too hard. Too final.

His fingers close around the edge of the silver sheet before he can stop himself.

He presses his ear to her chest.

There is no heartbeat.

Only the mountain.

Only the wind threading through the trees like distant breathing.

Only the soft whisper of snow settling over a body the world has decided to forget.

“No… no… no…”

Her lips move.

Just once.

Soundless.

But he understands.

You were supposed to find me sooner.

Behind him, something shifts.

Elena’s open eyes begin to fill.

Not with tears.

With black.

Ink-dark. Lightless.

They flood outward until the white is gone.

Until all that remains is reflection.

And in them, he sees the mountain.

The fog.

Himself.

And behind him—

Two green points of light.

Watching.

Cassius jerks awake with a strangled breath, his hand clawed over his heart, ribs aching as if something inside him is still frozen.

The nightmare always ends the same way: with the terrible realization that finding her body wasn’t the beginning of the mystery.

It was the end of something far worse.

Because somewhere in those wild, merciless mountains, whatever brought Elena to that desolate peak was still waiting—patient as ancient stone, cold as mountain wind, and inevitable as death itself.

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