It was the winter of 1873 when the fog first crept in thicker than it ever had before—clinging to the gaslit alleyways of Whitgrave like a jealous ghost. The townspeople said the air had changed, that the cold had teeth sharper than frost. They whispered of an unfamiliar carriage that passed each night down Bramble Street, its wheels never leaving a trace.

I first saw him that Thursday evening from my chamber window.

He stood beneath the iron lamplight, unmoving, his silhouette obscured by the vapors of the mist. Tall, rigid, as if chiseled from midnight stone. A man out of place—not merely foreign, but wrong, as though he had stepped sideways through time and shadow. His coat was cut from velvet so deep it swallowed the light, and his gloved hand rested upon a cane crowned with what looked like a silver wolf’s head.

No one knew his name. The innkeeper called him Mr. D’Argent, but said he never gave it himself. He had taken the westmost estate—the old Whitlock manor, long empty after the family tragedy—and within days, the birds stopped nesting in the garden trees.

Yet when your eyes met—only briefly, as I passed him in the graveyard..

But there was something in him—something haunted, something desperately beautiful. He had come to Whitgrave only for a short time, he told me later. He never intended to stay. Never meant to feel.

And yet…

Here is where my tale begins. In the deep heart of winter, with a man who did not cast a shadow, and a love that was never meant to breathe.