LOGINSandra’s POVI woke up with four things on my mind.The stair. The dinner. The full agreement. And Vanessa’s face in my doorway saying I am trying to keep you alive in that stripped-down voice that didn’t belong to the performance version of her.I lay there and looked at the water stain and let all four of them sit without trying to resolve any of them immediately. That was something the first version of me had never been good at — sitting with unresolved things. She’d always reached for the nearest explanation and held it too tight. I was trying to do better than that.The stair meant Zadok had been here. Late. Regularly enough that his feet had memorized something his mind probably hadn’t consciously tracked. I didn’t know what that meant yet and I wasn’t going to decide what it meant until I had more.The dinner was six days away and the Voss family was on the guest list and I had six days to understand the full shape of what was coming before it arrived.The agreement was in the
Sandra’s POVI stood there looking at my mother’s face for longer than I should have.She was younger than I’d ever imagined her — younger than I was now in the first life, younger than the vague shapeless idea of her I’d carried around for eighteen years because nobody had ever given me anything concrete to hold onto. My father didn’t keep photographs. Didn’t speak about her. The official version of her life in this house was her absence, and I’d grown up furnishing the gaps with whatever scraps I could find.This was the first real thing I’d ever had of her.I turned the photograph over and read her handwriting again.She knew exactly what she was protecting. So do you. Don’t stop.She’d written that knowing she might not be there to say it in person. She’d put it with Sable and trusted that it would reach me when I was ready for it, and whatever ready looked like she’d apparently decided it looked like this — standing in my father’s study at two in the morning with a man from the t
Sandra’s POVZadok was on his feet before the sound finished.Not rushed — controlled, the way he moved when something required his full attention and he’d already decided how to give it. He crossed to the door in three steps and I was right behind him and he put his hand out without looking back, the universal gesture for stay here, and I ignored it completely.He glanced back. Saw my face. Didn’t argue.We moved into the corridor together.The estate was dark in the way it gets when the deep hours have settled in properly — not the dark of absence but the dark of everything still and breathing. I knew every inch of this corridor. I’d walked it in the dark more times than I could count, early mornings and late nights and all the hours in between when sleep wouldn’t come and the walls felt too close.I knew which boards were silent and which weren’t.I moved accordingly.Zadok matched me without being told. Which meant he knew this house too — not surprising, he’d grown up between the
Sandra’s POVAgain.He said it and then he heard himself say it and something changed in his face — not panic, Zadok didn’t panic, but something close to the feeling underneath panic. The moment of realizing you’ve said the true thing before you meant to.I stood very still.“What did you just say,” I said.He didn’t answer immediately. He was doing that thing — the measured pause, the weighing — except this time it looked like the weighing wasn’t going well for him. Like the scales kept tipping somewhere he hadn’t planned.“I misspoke,” he said.“You don’t misspeak.”He looked at me. I looked back. The lamp on my desk was the only light and it put half his face in shadow and I wished it didn’t because I needed to see all of it right now.“Zadok.” I kept my voice level. Steady. Everything I didn’t feel. “What did you mean by again.”Silence. The estate around us was completely quiet in the way it gets in the deep hours — that specific absence of sound that makes a room feel like it ex
Sandra’s POVI walked home alone.She’d offered to take me somewhere safer, somewhere outside the estate, a contact on the north side of Blackridge who could put me up without questions. I’d said no. Not because I wasn’t frightened — I was, in that deep quiet way that doesn’t show on the surface but sits at the base of everything — but because going somewhere safe meant going somewhere away from the information and I wasn’t done yet.She’d pressed the document case into my hands before I left.“Your mother put this together,” she said. “Everything she found before they took her. Keep it somewhere they won’t think to look.”I had it tucked under my arm now, held close against my ribs, walking the long way back to the estate through streets I knew well enough to navigate without thinking. Which was good because thinking was happening at full capacity and had no room left for navigation.Zadok held the counter-signature.Zadok had held a legal claim to my life for eight years and I had s
Sandra’s POVI was out of my chair before the glass finished falling.Not because I was brave. Pure reflex — the kind your body develops when it’s died once already and decided that was enough. I grabbed the woman’s arm and pulled her sideways off her chair and we went down behind it together as something hit the wall where her head had been.Not a bullet. Something smaller, faster — a compressed wolfbane cartridge, the kind used for targeted delivery. It hit the plaster and burst and the smell came immediately, sharp and chemical, and I pulled my jacket over my nose and kept low.“Can you move,” I said.“Yes.” Her voice was steady. Steadier than mine would’ve been.“Door at the back.”“Storage room. No exit.”“Window on the second floor?”“Yes.”I looked at the window we’d come through. The glass was mostly gone, cold air pushing in hard, and the street beyond was dark in a way that was different from regular night dark — the lamp across the road had gone out. Someone had killed it d







