You left notes tucked inside books she'd already read—small thoughts, quiet observations. She never responded with words, but one day a single pressed rose appeared in your laundry.

Another time, a note in her looping, old-fashioned script waited on your pillow: “Do you ever dream of escape, or are you content being a secret?”

You didn’t answer—not with ink. But the next time you saw her, you lingered longer than you should have, eyes locked with hers until her breath caught and she stepped back.

The castle always whispered.

You had learned to walk carefully in it—to step where the stone was kind, to speak when silence could no longer hold. But with Bela Dimitrescu, silence was both a game and a blade.

“You’re bolder than the rest,” she said once, fingers idly trailing across the edge of a crimson velvet curtain. “They flinch. You don’t.”