LOGIN~Selene's POV~It is Lior who wakes her.This is not unusual. What is unusual is the time — not his standard five forty-three grievance, but something later, closer to two in the morning, a sound that resolves almost immediately into quiet as she moves down the hallway, as if her footsteps alone were sufficient. She lifts him from the bassinet and he settles against her shoulder with the abruptness of someone who required presence, not feeding, and she stands in the dark hallway for a moment, swaying slightly, until his breathing deepens back into sleep.She does not return to bed immediately.The apartment in these hours has a quality she has come to know well; the Silvermere night outside the window, the particular silence of a city that quiets but does not entirely stop, the faint ambient light that comes from no single source and illuminates nothing fully. She carries Lior back to the bassinet with the practiced economy of a woman who has learned to move in the dark without thinki
~Selene's POV~It is Lior who wakes her.This is not unusual. What is unusual is the time — not his standard five forty-three grievance, but something later, closer to two in the morning, a sound that resolves almost immediately into quiet as she moves down the hallway, as if her footsteps alone were sufficient. She lifts him from the bassinet and he settles against her shoulder with the abruptness of someone who required presence, not feeding, and she stands in the dark hallway for a moment, swaying slightly, until his breathing deepens back into sleep.She does not return to bed immediately.The apartment in these hours has a quality she has come to know well; the Silvermere night outside the window, the particular silence of a city that quiets but does not entirely stop, the faint ambient light that comes from no single source and illuminates nothing fully. She carries Lior back to the bassinet with the practiced economy of a woman who has learned to move in the dark without thinki
~Selene's POV~It is Lior who wakes her.This is not unusual. What is unusual is the time — not his standard five forty-three grievance, but something later, closer to two in the morning, a sound that resolves almost immediately into quiet as she moves down the hallway, as if her footsteps alone were sufficient. She lifts him from the bassinet and he settles against her shoulder with the abruptness of someone who required presence, not feeding, and she stands in the dark hallway for a moment, swaying slightly, until his breathing deepens back into sleep.She does not return to bed immediately.The apartment in these hours has a quality she has come to know well; the Silvermere night outside the window, the particular silence of a city that quiets but does not entirely stop, the faint ambient light that comes from no single source and illuminates nothing fully. She carries Lior back to the bassinet with the practiced economy of a woman who has learned to move in the dark without thinki
~Caden's POV~Rhys arrives without knocking, which is his established method when the thing he is carrying cannot wait for the formality of a knock.He sets a piece of paper on the desk, not the medical document, not Conrad's reports, something he has clearly written himself, and he stands with it between them and says: "She's had them by now."Caden reads the paper.It is arithmetic. Clean, simple, undeniable. Fourteen weeks at the rejection. Standard twin gestation. Rhys has written it out in the spare notation of a man who does not enjoy what he is demonstrating but believes the demonstration is necessary; gestational weeks, approximate birth window, the resulting date range that places the birth between six and ten weeks ago.He has known this.This is the thing about Rhys's four words that requires him to sit inside them rather than respond to them: he has known the arithmetic since the night of the medical document. He has run these numbers. He knows them with the same precision
~Selene's POV~The appointment is at nine.She is up before six, as she has been since the twins arrived — Lior announcing himself at five forty-three with the particular urgency of someone who has decided that the household's sleep schedule is a matter he intends to adjudicate personally. She feeds him in the chair by the window while the city outside is still in its pre-dawn grey, one hand curved around his head, the other resting in her lap, and she watches him eat with the focused attention of someone still learning the specific rhythms of another person. He is very clear about his rhythms. He has been clear about them since approximately the second hour of his life.Asha is still asleep.This is consistent with Asha. She wakes on her own terms, assesses her surroundings at whatever pace she requires, and signals her needs with a patience that is so unlike her brother's that Selene sometimes watches her in the early morning and thinks: already yourself. Already entirely, completel
~Caden's POV~The border patrol restructuring has been on his desk since Thursday.It is now Saturday — the early hours of it, not yet two in the morning — and he has been working through the eastern rotation assignments for the past three hours with the methodical attention the task requires after Fenwick's removal. Eight years of patrol scheduling built around a mid-rank Gamma who was feeding its patterns to Ironmere. The entire eastern division needs to be rebuilt from first principles: new rotation intervals, new checkpoint positions, new communication protocols that route through channels Fenwick never had access to. It is granular, detailed work. He is good at it.He prefers, currently, work that requires this kind of sustained precision. Work that asks something specific of him and accepts a specific answer. Work that does not leave gaps in which other things can settle.Rhys arrives at half past eleven and stays.This is not unusual. Rhys has developed, over the past months, t
~Selene’s POV~The search takes most of the morning.I sit at the small table with my phone and the notepad Miriam has left beside the kettle, and I work through it methodically — not the way someone searches in desperation, but the way someone builds a list. High-risk obstetric specialist. Superna
~Selene’s POV~The ceiling is unfamiliar.That is the first thing. The particular angle of the light coming through curtains that hang differently than the ones I have woken to for three years, the texture of a plaster ceiling that belongs to no one I know, the absence of the sound the Manor made
~Selene’s POV~My mother is waiting at the bottom of the stone steps.She doesn't ask questions. She doesn't say anything at all when I come through the Pack Hall doors and down the wide stone staircase, one hand trailing the rail because my legs are still deciding whether they will cooperate. She
~Caden’s POV~Dawn comes in through the east-facing windows of his office in thin, pale strips.He has not moved.The chair is the same chair he sat in when Rhys left. The folder is still open on the desk in front of him, the single page inside it facing upward, the words legible from where he sits







