The gown stopped turning.
It hung there, empty sleeves swaying faintly as though something invisible still breathed inside the fabric, and then, as suddenly as the motion had started, it stilled completely—red silk settling back into perfect, lifeless silence.
Lin Yue did not move.
Beside him, Bai Wuyin's breathing had gone very quiet, the kind of quiet that came from deliberate control rather than fear. "It's not doing anything else," he said, after a long moment.
"No," Lin Yue agreed. "It already did what it wanted to do."
"Which was?"
"Confirm we're being watched." Lin Yue's eyes moved slowly down the row of hanging gowns, counting the shoes beneath them without meaning to, the number climbing far past what he was comfortable acknowledging. "Whatever's down here, it already knows we've arrived."
