Novels by Ziri Ink

KATE’S POVNobody moved.Stefena Romano, the woman who had made an art form out of saying exactly as much as she intended and never a syllable more, was sitting in that chair looking at her husband like she had finally run out of road.Carter had gone very still.Not the polite stillness of a man waiting for someone to finish speaking. The kind that meant his body had made a unilateral decision to stop while his mind caught up.“Stefena,” he said. Just her name. Low and careful.“Let me finish,” she said.He sat back down slowly.She didn’t look at anyone else in the room. Not at Justin standing by the wall with his jaw tight. Not at me. Not at Fiona, who had gone very quiet in the way of someone who already knew what was coming and was bracing for the version of it spoken aloud.She kept her eyes on Carter.“I found out about Martha three years into your relationship with her,” she began. “Not the affair, I knew about that earlier. I mean I found out about the child.”Carter’s expres

LEON’S POVJared Adams was standing in my entrance hall.Not invited. Not expected. Just there, with his jacket slightly creased and his eyes doing that thing they did when he had been drinking enough to feel brave but not enough to be stupid. Fiona stood a few feet away from him, which told me the two of them had not arrived together by choice.Carter was near the door.He looked at me when I came in and gave a small tight shake of his head that meant he hadn’t known Jared was coming either.“How did you get past the gate?” I asked.Jared smiled. The particular smile of a man who thought charm could patch over anything. “Your security recognised me from the wedding.”I made a mental note to deal with that later.“Leon.” Carter’s voice was low. “We need to talk. All of us. It’s time.”I looked at Fiona.She was watching me with that steady expression she had, the one that gave nothing away from a distance but said quite a lot if you knew where to look. She looked tired. Not the tiredn

KATE’S POVI stared at the message for a moment.I’m outside. I think I owe you both an explanation.Twelve words. Sitting on my screen with the particular weight of something that had been composed and deleted and recomposed several times before being sent. I knew Allison’s texting well enough to recognize when a message had cost her something.This one had.I looked at Leon.He was already reading it over my shoulder, his expression giving nothing away, that careful neutral face he used when he was deciding how to handle something rather than reacting to it.“I’ll go,” I said.“Kate—”“She came to me,” I said. “Not to you. Not to the situation. To me.” I held his gaze. “Let me go to the door.”A pause.He nodded.I walked out of the sitting room and down the entrance hall. Behind me the house was full of a particular kind of loaded silence, Stefena in her chair, Justin standing with his arms folded, Leon watching everything.I reached the front door and stopped with my hand on the h

LEON’S POVI pulled up the news on my phone.It loaded in the particular way that breaking stories loaded, slightly slower than usual, like the servers were straining under the weight of everyone trying to reach the same thing at the same time.The headline was the first thing.Then the image beneath it.I looked at it for a moment without speaking. Then I crossed to the television on the far wall of the sitting room and switched it on, finding the news channel without having to search for it because it was already the first thing that came up.The screen filled with a press conference.Live.Natalie Smith was standing at a podium.She was dressed carefully, the kind of careful that had been thought through, dark and composed, the visual language of someone presenting themselves as a victim rather than an aggressor. Her auburn hair was pulled back. Her expression was controlled and serious and designed for exactly this moment.Behind her stood two people I recognised as her family’s l

KATE’S POVI didn’t stay in the car.I know he asked me to. I heard the please in his voice which was rare enough to register and I had sat there for approximately fifteen seconds genuinely trying to honour it before something overrode it entirely.This was my house too.Whatever was happening behind that open door was happening in a place that had my name attached to it and involved people whose decisions had shaped my entire life and I was done sitting in cars and waiting rooms and corridors while other people handled things that belonged to me as much as anyone else.I got out.Justin was already opening his door.I looked at him briefly.He looked back with an expression that said he understood the instruction had been given and had also decided it didn’t apply to him.We went in together.The entrance hall was quiet. Leon was standing just inside the doorway to the sitting room, his back to us, completely still in that way that meant every part of him was paying close attention t

LEON’S POVWe left Luciana with her sister.Not because it was the safest option necessarily but because it was the option Luciana had chosen and she had earned the right to make that particular choice. I left my private contact posted at the end of the street with instructions to call me directly if anything changed and to let nothing through that he couldn’t account for.Justin came with us.That hadn’t been planned but it hadn’t been a surprise either. He had stood in that sitting room after everything settled and looked at me with Carter’s eyes and said quietly that he wasn’t going back to wherever he had come from until he understood the full shape of what he had walked into.I couldn’t argue with that.Carter drove separately. We had spoken briefly in the hallway before leaving, just the two of us, while Kate sat with Justin in the sitting room and Luciana’s sister made tea that nobody drank.My father had looked at me in the hallway with an expression I hadn’t seen on him befor

AthenaThe east wing was nice.I hated that it was nice.I’d been prepared to find something to complain about, some deliberate slight in the room choice, something that would confirm what I already believed about being here. Instead I walked into a suite with high ceilings and wide windows overlooking a garden, furniture that was heavy and dark and clearly expensive, and a connecting room that had already been set up for a child.Amara walked into it and stopped dead.There was a small bed with carved wolves on the headboard. A window seat. A shelf with books on it that someone had clearly placed there recently because the spines were too neat, too deliberate.“Mama.” Her voice came out hushed.“I see it.”“There are wolves on my bed.”“I see that too.”She turned to me with an expression that was trying very hard not to be delighted and failing completely. Then she ran and threw herself on the bed and the stuffed rabbit flew somewhere and I stood in the doorway watching her and felt

RowanShe arrived on the third day.I knew before anyone told me. Something shifted in the air around midday, some low pull at the base of my skull, faint enough that I could have ignored it if I’d wanted to. I didn’t examine it too closely. Just set down the report I’d been reading and looked at the window.Lake appeared in the doorway twelve minutes later. “She’s at the gate.”“I know.”He opened his mouth.“Tell the council the meeting is postponed.” I stood. “And keep Rurik away from the east wing.”“He’s going to ask questions.”“Let him ask.” I straightened my jacket. “Just make sure he asks them from a distance.”The courtyard was half full when I got there. Word moved fast in a palace, it always had, and I could see the staff finding reasons to be near windows, near doorways. I ignored them. Walked to the front steps and stood there with my hands clasped behind my back and waited.The car came through the gate and stopped.Chase got out first. I’d known about Chase, had him lo

AthenaDami cried.I hadn’t expected that. Dami was twenty two and sharp-mouthed and acted like nothing touched her, and she stood in the middle of the emptied shop with her arms folded and tears running down her face like she wasn’t even aware they were happening.“Stop it.” I said.“I’m not doing anything.” She wiped her face with her sleeve.“You’re crying.”“I have allergies.”“Dami.”She made a sound somewhere between a laugh and a sob and looked away, jaw working. “You built this place from nothing. You know that right. You came here with Chase and a duffel bag and you built this from actual nothing and now you’re just—” she gestured at the bare walls, the covered equipment, the boxes stacked by the door.“I’ll be back.” I said.She looked at me.“I mean it. The shop isn’t closing, you’re running it, everything stays, I’ll be back when I can.” I had spent the better part of yesterday sorting out the paperwork for it. The shop stayed in my name. Dami ran operations. I was not lea

RowanLake wouldn’t stop talking.That was the thing about him, he filled silence like it personally offended him, and the drive back from the human quarter had been forty minutes of him cycling through every possible angle of what had just happened while I sat in the passenger seat and said nothing.“—five years old, which means she was already pregnant when she left, which means you’ve had a daughter for five years and didn’t know, which means—”“Lake.”“—the curse, Rowan, a child changes everything about the curse timeline, we need to contact the witch again because if the child carries Silverthorne blood then maybe—”“Lake.”He stopped.“Drive.” I said.He drove.I leaned my head back and closed my eyes and tried to do something useful with the thing sitting in the middle of my chest. It wasn’t anger. I’d expected anger, had braced for it the entire drive to the human quarter, told myself I was going to feel nothing, handle it clean, bring her back, done.Then a small person with

AthenaI didn’t sleep the first night.Lay flat on my back staring at the ceiling while Amara starfished beside me, one arm thrown across my face, completely unbothered by the world ending outside her dreams. I moved her arm for the fourth time and she put it back. I left it there.Three days.I’d built this life in three years. The shop, the apartment above it, the routine, the regulars who came in every few months and asked about my week like they meant it. Dami, who was twenty two and terrifying with a liner brush and had somehow become the little sister I never asked for. The Wednesday market two streets down where the old woman sold pepper soup out of a pot the size of a small car.Three days to pack it into boxes.I turned my head and looked at Amara’s face in the dark. She slept with her mouth slightly open, a small frown between her brows like even in sleep she was solving something. She got that from me. The frown. The mouth open thing was all her own.The silver eyes though.

Of all the things my daughter could have said.Of all the moments for her mouth to work faster than her brain.“Amara.” My voice came out steady, which was a miracle considering my heart was doing something violent inside my chest. “Go back to Dami.”“But I’m hungry—”“I’ll get you something in a minute. Go.”She looked between me and him one more time, those silver eyes — his eyes, god, his eyes — narrowing slightly like she was filing something away for later. Then she turned and padded back through the door.The room felt smaller after she left.I didn’t turn around. Stood there facing the back door for a second longer than I needed to, just breathing, just trying to get my face right before I had to look at him again.When I turned he was still standing exactly where he’d been. But something had shifted. The controlled, cold thing he’d walked in wearing was gone. He looked like someone had hit him with both hands.Good.No. Not good. Nothing about this was good.“How old.” His voi