Burninghandss
Grace Adair never minded the rain.
She liked the way it blurred the world outside the window. Made everything less sharp, less real. Less likely to cut.
She sat in her usual place - top floor of the east wing library, nestled between forgotten theology texts and a broken globe that still spun, barely, when the wind pushed through the cracked stained glass. Her journal was open on her lap, words bleeding into the page with ink as dark as the bruises she never talked about.
It wasn't the kind people saw - not the kind anyone would dare ask about. It was the kind that lived deeper. Beneath skin. Beneath silence.
She heard him before she saw him.
The heavy door groaned like it hated being disturbed.
Grace didn't look up. She never did.
"You skipped curfew," he said, his voice low and sharp like winter air.
She turned a page in her journal, slowly. "You didn't come looking."
Grayson Vale.
The name alone carried too much weight. Too much history. He wasn't just another Hollowmere boy with a tragic family name and an inheritance that bought silence. He was something worse. Something real.
He stepped into the room, each footstep echoing in the hollow silence. His uniform was damp, rain-soaked at the edges. His tie was gone, shirt collar unbuttoned - a deliberate defiance of the rules. But that was who Grayson was. A rule dressed as a boy, designed to be broken.
Or to break others.
He stood before her now, too close for comfort, too far to reach.
"I looked," he said after a moment. "You just didn't want to be found."
She closed her journal.
"Maybe I didn't."
--Gray's Grace is a haunting tale of love caught in the gray - where nothing is certain, and everything is at risk.--