*~~Chapter One Hundred and Seventy-Five~~*

{~~Avery Sterling~~}

I hadn’t had a nightmare in a long time, but I knew as soon as I stepped into the eerie, fog-draped forest that I was there for a reason. This wasn’t the first time I found myself wandering through this dark and twisted place. There was something hauntingly familiar about the trees, their gnarled branches reaching out like skeletal fingers, the heavy silence broken only by the faint sound of leaves rustling, almost as if whispering secrets. It felt like a memory I could never quite shake—a deep-rooted feeling that something terrible lurked in these woods, something I couldn’t escape.

The last time I was here, my sister’s shadow had been stalking me relentlessly, tormenting me with every step I took. It was as if she had become part of the forest itself, her presence suffocating and dark, haunting the life out of me. But this time… this time, it was something different. Something worse. Something that made my skin crawl and the hairs on the back of my neck stand on