A cold shiver shot down my spine as realization dawned on me: I had broken the vow. Somewhere in my house, in the innocent hands of my family, that cursed book had been touched, opened... perhaps even read. It wasn't just a mistake—it was the fatal error we had all feared.
The air around me seemed to thicken, suffused with a suffocating weight. Shadows gathered in the corners of the room, pulsing with a dark life of their own.
Memories resurfaced of our initiation, of my best friend Nora's whispered warnings on our way home, on the very day I took my oath.
And the stern gaze of the fraternity’s leader as she made us repeat the vow over and over, her voice laden with centuries of suppressed terror. *“You bind them with bl!ood. You own them with silence.”* The warning echoed in my mind.
Now, my...