Footsteps? No, of course not. Who else would be awake at this unholy hour? Certainly only killers and thieves, in which case Miles should probably cross himself twice and pray that those weren't footsteps ahead of him. Stitch his eyes closed tight and not take so much as a peek around the next poorly lit corner in the stairwell. If he was the roaming thief, there was only one other cast slot open for auditions tonight.
But should Miles heed none of his intuition, and should curiosity begin to string him up like a cat to be skinned, and should he round that next set of stairs, he'd come upon her.
Even if it had been her footsteps that were echoing, she was not moving now. Neither descending nor ascending, just caught in the purgatory of floors in between. And even if she heard his approach, her attention was not for him; there was not a flinch or a glance bestowed in his direction as her fascination remained so apparently, and fervently, pinned to the sound of silence radiating from the floors below.
She was a thin carve of moonlight, stretched across a sickle. Pale, but not quite sickly. Thin, but incapable of fragility. She was lean in the way a junkyard dog was, survival of the fittest brought on by a diet of human blood and ill-advised rabbits. She would not have been familiar, not to him or any great many of the current residents of Bellum. Vaughn had not shown her face here in quite some time, the fact that she was now was surely a case for alarm.. but only if one were to know her, and a great many could be thankful that they did not.
Her manner of dress was strange, but there might have been a level of familiarity in it. Weathered emerald satin, dripping a few tattered and lacy embellishments down the bone carve of her calves. It was the kind of slip that one could pick loose from a two-dollar bin at any thrift store, or maybe the kind that was passed down through so many years of neglectful sentiment.. but in either case, it was surely not intended to be worn as a dress. Or to be worn so regal and careless, like the lovely Antoinette wandering her final cell. A black knit jacket overlapped the gargoyle draw of her shoulders, and that little movement might have been the only clue that she actually heard his approach. Avian hands wedged into the secretive depth of pockets, and she didn't turn, but instead cast a glance in his direction. Her eyes were pale as the belly of a fish, and her cheekbones seemed sharp enough to cut a throat.
Recognition, or maybe just interest, creased her eyes, drawing thin brows toward the rotten kinks of her halo. What were the odds of this happening again? Another place, another face.