Callie’s POV
I woke up to the feeling of silk against my skin and the scent of woodsmoke and vanilla wrapping around me.
For a long, disorienting moment, I didn’t open my eyes. I just lay there, floating in a state of impossible comfort. The mattress beneath me was soft, yielding in a way my lumpy futon back at Briarcliff never was, and the duvet felt like a weighted cloud anchoring me to the bed.
But the strangest thing wasn’t the luxury. It was the silence.
For as long as I could remember, maybe my whole life, there had been a noise in my head. A low-level static, like a radio tuned between stations, that would swell from a hum to a buzz, and when I was stressed, into a headache that felt like a drill boring into my temples.
Now? It was gone.
My mind was a still, glassy lake, and
