Ivana didn't react.
She'd expected something.
Not the note exactly, but the weight. The confirmation. The way the walls seemed to tighten around her the longer she stayed at Valerian Academy.
The way certain people looked at her like they were trying to remember a ghost.
Three days had passed since her arrival, and things weren't just… strange.
They were orchestrated.
Maps that didn't line up. Corridors that flickered. A scheduled glitch that sent her to a class that didn't exist.
And most of all: the East Wing.
The building itself was still there — visible from the quad. Gated off in part, yes, but not hidden. Professors mentioned it in passing like it was under light renovation.
But what Ivana found two days ago said otherwise.
A hallway. A door. A silence that didn't belong in a place this loud.
She hadn't meant to find it. She'd been cutting through a corridor near the archives trying to avoid Professor Voss's hawk-like stare.
That's when she saw it.
A black door at the end of a narrow corridor, tucked behind a velvet curtain that didn't match the decor.
Tall. Smooth. Without a handle.
No placard. No camera. Just stone, silence, and something underneath it all that made her bones buzz.
And this time, she wasn't walking away.
The corridor was empty again. Quiet. The kind of quiet that didn't echo.
Ivana stepped slowly toward the door.
The closer she got, the heavier the air felt. Like gravity concentrated here.
Her fingers hovered near the surface, not touching it but close enough to feel the chill bleeding through.
Then
"Don't."
Her body jerked.
She turned fast.
Leo Moretti leaned against the wall a few feet back, his presence somehow louder than the silence.
"Didn't realize you were in campus security," she said, steady.
"I'm not," he replied. "But I know trouble when I see it walking into things it doesn't understand."
She didn't flinch.
"What is this place?"
He didn't answer right away. Instead, he pushed off the wall and walked a slow half-circle around her, gaze flicking from her hand to the door.
"They used to call it the Oath Wing," he said. "A long time ago."
Ivana kept her expression blank. "Sounds dramatic."
"It was. Back before the Council whitewashed half the school history. Back before the fire."
That made her pulse skip. "Fire?"
Leo's jaw tensed.
"The kind that burned out bloodlines."
"And now?"
"Now it doesn't exist," he said quietly. "At least, that's the official story."
He met her gaze again. For a moment, she swore he saw more than he let on. But then
"You ask dangerous questions, Zara Grey."
Her shoulders stiffened.
"Excuse me?"
He stepped a little closer.
"Scholarship students don't normally wander down here. Or sniff around old ghosts. Or look at that door like it's whispering to them."
"And what do you think it's whispering?"
Leo's expression darkened.
"Not everything behind that door stays dead."
He turned and walked off, leaving the silence colder than before.
That night, she didn't sleep.
The black rose was still beside her bed.
A note now rested under it shorter, more cryptic.
Tied with a red thread and sealed in wax.
Not yet.
But soon.
Ivana folded it once, tucked it under her mattress, and lay back in the dark.
She could still feel the door in her bones.
And the way Leo had looked at her like he wasn't sure if she was a threat...
...or a memory.