Page 478 of A Society of Traitors

I was the intruder. Not him.

What if he smelled me?

The footsteps sounded again, but, to my surprise, they moved away, becoming fainter and fainter until I heard the loud stone shelf below. Then silence.

What had he been doing up here?

Exhausted from all the thoughts, I slid down the shelf with my back, listened to the silence I craved for my mind for a long time now, tilted my head back, closed my eyes, and took ten deep breaths. When I opened my eyes again, I studied the books on the dark wooden shelf in front of me.

The bookshelf with the Umbra tomes was by far the most beautiful, not only because of the wood carvings, but also because of the bindings.

So much gold, as if the dark practices had never been forbidden, but on the contrary, had been something magnificent, something noble.

Each book had its own decoration that seemed to tell a story, so that those books without ornate embellishments or jagged, curved, golden rune debossings stood out, as if they were intruders.

I slid closer to the shelf, leaned forward, and ran my index finger over the black, unadorned leather of one of the books on the bottom shelf. Unlike all the other bindings here, it wasn't rough at all. Nor was it as old as the other books.

Confused, I pulled it from the shelf and looked at the simple little book with the debossed silver snake in the middle of the black front cover. I could already see the slightly yellowed white paper at the edge.

I opened the book.

And my world stopped when I read the name on the first page.

Warning!

The following chapters contain self-harm,

glorification of self-harm, substance abuse,

bullying, and explicit sexual violence.

The author deliberately does not hide or soften

sexual violence, as they believe there are still too

many unrealistic representations and misleading

discussions on the topic that reinforce the