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“My own?”

“This library. It’s yours.”

The room spins when I face him. “Mine?”

“This has been a tomb for my mother’s thoughts and passions since she died. These books need to be read.”

I look back at the shelves. The ladders. The table. At the deliberate order of it. Vanessa once cared enough to keep it perfect when this room was alive with page turns and the slow comfort of stories.

Now grief wanders through it. His grief.

He draws in a breath. “Don’t let it sit empty.”

My eyes burn with tears. Something good is reaching for me, but I don’t know how to hold on. This isn’t a toy or a distraction. He’s handing me this sacred place, a memory. Trust.

“Of course.” My voice comes out small. I need him to understand that I won’t treat this lightly. “I promise.”

Gentleness softens his face in a way that he rarely shows anyone else. The way he makes me feel like I’m worth keeping. And I can’t stop smiling.

“I mean it,” I say. “Thank you.”

He leans down and kisses me, his lips lingering. When he pulls away, my attention is already drifting back to the shelves, hungry for what they hold.

I move around the perimeter, my fingertips brushing spines. Titles. Authors. Words I recognize and words I don’t. I feel thirteen again, sneaking a bodice-ripper paperback under my pillow. For the first time in weeks, I’m close to the version of myself that existed before fear consumed everything.

Then a particular spine catches my eye.

Dracula.

I slide it from the shelf. The cover is dark and beautiful, with the title embossed in red beneath my fingers. It’s heavier than it looks, with thick pages that are silky to the touch. A ribbon bookmark rests inside.

Without thinking, I carry it to a chair tucked into the corner and curl into it. The chair’s upholstery is worn but soft against my skin. The room’s chill makes me wish I had a blanket, even with the August heat outside.

When I glance up, Edwin is still watching. There’s a softness on his face. Relief. Like he’s seeing something else when he looks at me.

“I’ll leave you to it,” he says.

Then he slips out of the library, closing the door quietly behind him, leaving me alone with more books than I could ever read in a lifetime.

I open Dracula to where the ribbon lies. Elegant script is in the margins. A woman’s handwriting. But it’s the underlined sentence beneath my thumb that makes me pause.

I feel I am now in danger from the evil that has been hovering around me.

I read it again, letting it sink in.

Inked in the margin is a note from Vanessa.

Harness the monster.

Her words come alive on the page, a pulsing secret meant for me. My fingers press the ink as if I can absorb it.

I think of Edwin. Not the man who kisses my forehead when I’m half asleep, but the other side of him. The side that doesn’t blink at violence, that looks at me like I’m his reason to live and his reason to kill.

His devotion is a blade. And I’m holding the hilt.

My throat tightens as I scan the page. Vanessa understood. She had her own monster—Harold. She wrote that line like she was trying to convince herself. As though she were guiding the next woman to walk the same path.

Her loneliness lingers between the lines. The isolation of standing beside power. The burden of being watched and feeling less real.