Prologue

Voices first. That's how it always starts.

Her mother's voice, low and tight, the kind of tight that meant she was trying not to shout. Her father's, right behind it, clipped and fast. Words she couldn't catch, only the shape of them the rise, the crack, the silence that followed like something holding its breath.

Then the phone. The small electronic click of it being picked up. Her mother's voice again, but different now pleading dressed up as calm. “Please. Just a little more time.”A pause where the other voice should have been, except she never hears that voice. Never has. Not once, not in four years of this same dream.

Smell comes next, always. Charcoal, thick and bitter, curling under the door of her room. Something sweeter underneath it, something wrong, something her small body already knew to be afraid of before she had a name for it.

Then footsteps. Not her mother's. Not her father's. A third set, heavier, deliberate, crossing the floor like it owned it.

The furniture goes first, a chair scraping hard against wood, then falling. Something clattering, glass maybe, or metal. Her mother's voice again, sharper now, no longer pleading. Her father's voice under it, low and urgent, saying something she can never hold onto no matter how many times she dreams it.

And then…the sound. The one that never changes. A voice, close to her door, close to her, saying something so soft she should be able to catch it. She always almost does. She never does.

Then nothing. Not silence ..nothing. The dream doesn't end so much as stop, like a candle pinched out between two fingers.

She wakes with her heart going too hard against her ribs, breath caught somewhere high in her throat. Her hands go to her face before her mind fully surfaces ,fingers finding the scarf still tied snug over her eyes, exactly where it should be, exactly where it always is, even in sleep. That, at least, hasn't moved.

The room is too quiet. Palace quiet. The kind of quiet that costs money.

She sits up slowly, feet finding the cold stone floor, and does what she always does after, presses her palms flat against her knees, counts her own breaths until they behave, until her pulse stops trying to outrun her. Four years old in the dream. Ten years older than that now. It doesn't matter. The dream doesn't age with her.

She never remembers the whole night. Only this …the same four or five pieces, shuffled slightly differently each time, never quite completing themselves. A voice she cannot place. A smell she will recognize for the rest of her life. And underneath all of it, the quiet certainty that whatever actually happened that night, no one has ever told her the truth of it.

She breathes in. Out. Ties the scarf tighter, though it was never loose.

Then she rises, and begins the day exactly as she has for six years, as if the dream were something that belonged to someone else.