Fire in the Velvet Dark

The silence in the ancestral library was no longer a heavy, mourning void; it was an intimate, sacred space charged with the unspoken truths of two souls laying down their arms. Outside, the blizzard roared across the moors, rattling the iron-framed leaded windows with wild, impotent fury, but inside the golden circle of firelight, the world had shrunk to the width of the velvet duvet and the man sitting beside…