Prologue

I woke at three in the morning, heart pounding, the back of my neck drenched in sweat.

The dream was already dissolving — the way nightmares do when you can’t quite hold onto them, leaving only something sticky and unpleasant behind, like cobwebs brushing your face. Something dark. Something huge. Something that had watched me from the dark without moving. The details slipped away. The feeling stayed.

I sat up and stared at the ceiling.

Silence.

A flat without Lexa was a different flat entirely. Not a worse one, no. Just ... loud, in that particular way silence gets loud — the kind you only notice once you’ve grown used to someone else’s breathing across the room. An arm or a leg thrown over yours in the night. Lexa was my sister. She’d gone back to our parents in Manchester for a couple of days, leaving me on my own again. She’d always needed someone close. Or warmth. Perhaps both.

I got up and went to the kitchen.

The kettle. My favourite mug — the one my sister had given me last birthday, reading “To my big sister, from your favourite and only sister.” An Earl Grey teabag, because Mum was right about one thing at least: coffee at three in the morning was practically a diagnosis.

“Proper girls drink tea,” her voice surfaced in my head, word-perfect, tone and all. Stern. Immovable. “Not that filthy coffi of yours.”

Coffi. Twenty years old, and I could still hear it in exactly that voice — a leftover from Nan’s side of the family, one of the handful of Welsh words that had survived three generations of English weddings and still slipped out whenever Mum wanted to make a point.

I wrapped both hands round the mug and leaned against the windowsill. Outside was Exeter in August — quiet, faintly drowsy, even by the standards of a small university city. Streetlamps. Wet tarmac after the evening rain. Not a soul in sight.

The tea had gone cold while I stared out of the window. I took a sip and pulled a face.

Drinking cold tea in the middle of the night, alone, watching an empty street — this, apparently, was adulthood. Well done, Alexandra Vance. You made it.

Somewhere down underneath, something else had woken with the nightmare and wasn’t in a hurry to leave.