WHAT JUNE SEES

CHAPTER sIX

They arrived a little after ten the next morning — June first, dragging two suitcases she'd clearly overpacked, then Theo trailing behind her with his backpack and the stuffed fox he pretended he'd grown out of and never actually let go of. Lyra was on the front steps before the car had fully stopped.

Theo hit her at a run. She caught him, felt the solid weight of him against her ribs, and for a second the whole house — the lock, the photograph, Calder Mace's face in black and white — receded to something manageable.

"You have a gate," Theo said, muffled against her shoulder. "With, like, actual guards."

"I noticed that too."

June came up slower, scanning the front of the house the way she scanned everything now — for exits, for tells, for the thing that didn't fit. She'd been doing it since their father died. Lyra hated that she recognized the habit so well, because it was hers.

"You look tired," June said, which was June's way of asking if Lyra was okay.

"I'm fine. Come inside before Theo tries to climb the hedges."

Rosa met them in the front hall with a warmth that surprised Lyra — she crouched to Theo's height and asked about the fox by name, Sergeant Biscuit, which Theo had named on his own and never told anyone outside the family. Theo lit up. June's eyes cut sideways to Lyra, sharp and questioning, and Lyra gave the smallest shake of her head. Later.

Dimitri appeared from the study as they were being shown to the east wing — the wing with the new lock, though someone had clearly removed it sometime in the night, because the frame was clean and unmarked when Lyra checked it on the way past. He crouched down to Theo's level with an ease that didn't match anything else about him, all that coiled stillness folding down into something almost gentle.

"You like dinosaurs," Dimitri said. Not a question.

Theo's whole face opened up. "T-Rex or Spinosaurus?"

"Depends on the argument you're making."

"Spinosaurus could swim. That's basically cheating but it's still cool."

Dimitri's mouth did something that wasn't quite a smile. "I'll allow it."

Theo ran off toward the window seat, already narrating a dinosaur battle to Sergeant Biscuit, and Lyra let out a breath she hadn't realized she was holding. It should have felt like relief. It didn't, not entirely — there was something underneath it, small and cold, that she couldn't name yet.

June named it for her twenty minutes later, once they were alone in the room with the rose-garden window, unpacking Theo's things into a dresser he'd never sleep close enough to actually need.

"He knew," June said quietly.

"Knew what?"

"That show Theo's obsessed with. The dinosaur one. He didn't ask what Theo liked — he already knew. He knew before we got here." June folded a shirt with more precision than the task required, not looking up. "I've watched people fake knowing things about kids to get in good with them. That wasn't that. That was someone who'd already done the homework."

Lyra's hands went still over the drawer.

She thought of the flowers on her nightstand — white, odorless, chosen for someone whose preferences hadn't been asked. She thought of the mountain photographs, returned to again and again. She thought of Dimitri saying precaution, and when the time is right, and the particular stillness of a man who measured out truth like it was rationed.

"How long have you known him?" June asked. "Really known him. Not the version from the news."

"Three days."

June looked up at that, and for a moment she wasn't sixteen and armored — she was just scared, the way she'd been scared in the hospital waiting room the night their father didn't come home. "Then how does he know things about us that we haven't told anyone?"

Lyra didn't have an answer. That was the problem. She'd asked Dimitri the same shape of question the night before and gotten a photograph and half a name instead of a full one, and she was beginning to understand that every answer he gave her was a door he'd chosen to open, never one she'd forced.

She thought about her father then — the matchbook. She'd found it three nights ago, tucked into the lining of his coat when she'd gone through his things because someone had to and it clearly wasn't going to be grief that did the sorting, it was going to be her, the way it always was. A plain black matchbook, no restaurant name, just an address scrawled inside the flap in her father's handwriting, cramped and rushed like he'd written it somewhere he didn't want to be caught writing it.

She'd assumed it was nothing. A supplier. A meeting she'd never know the purpose of.

She hadn't told Dimitri about it.

"I need to check something," Lyra said, already moving toward her bag.

"Lyra—"

"Stay with Theo. I won't be long."

She found the matchbook where she'd hidden it, inside a rolled pair of socks she hadn't had reason to unpack. The address was still there, still in her father's rushed hand, and now that she had a working knowledge of the city's geography that she hadn't had three days ago, she recognized the district. Industrial. Storage facilities, mostly — the kind of place people put things they didn't want found in a house that could be searched.

She looked up the address on her phone with her back to the door, some instinct telling her not to be seen doing it. The listing came back fast: a self-storage facility off the eastern corridor, unit 214.

Registered, according to the online portal that popped up when she entered the unit number out of pure reflex, to Lyra Donnelly.

She stared at her own name on the screen.

She had never opened a storage unit in her life. Had never signed a lease, never paid a f*e, never once in twenty-six years needed to put anything somewhere her own house couldn't hold.

Someone had put her name on it for her.

She thought about her father's handwriting, cramped and hurried. She thought about a name your father put there himself, before he knew what it would cost.

Downstairs, she could hear Theo laughing at something Dimitri had said, easy and unguarded, the sound of a nine-year-old who had no idea what house he was standing in.

Lyra closed the matchbook in her fist and didn't tell anyone where she was going.