ANMELDENSelene’s POV“Sit down,” I say. “Before Edna finds out you are vertical.”Bowen looks at me with the expression he reserves for when I say something he agrees with but does not want to agree with, and then he comes into the kitchen and sits in the chair Mara pulls out for him with the speed of someone who has been waiting for an excuse to do something useful.Reina puts tea in front of him without being asked.He looks around the table. At Edrin, whom he does not recognise. At Talia, whom he does not recognise. At Caden, who he did not expect to still be here. At Lucian against the wall. At me, standing at the head of the table with my hands flat on the surface.“You have been busy,” he says.“It has been a full morning,” I agree.I tell him. Quickly and without embellishment, the way the week has trained me to deliver information, because every hour we spend catching people up is an hour Rael’s lawyers are using for something else. Edrin alive, the incapacitation filing, the forty-ei
Selene’s POVThe kitchen goes very quiet.Reina stops stirring. Mara sets down a plate. Talia’s face does something sharp and immediate, the expression of someone who has heard a word they recognise and does not like where it leads.I look at Edrin.He is looking at the table.“You knew this was possible,” I say. Not a question. I have stopped asking things as questions when I already know the answer.“Rael has been building a case for incapacitation for eight months,” he says. His voice is steady but there is something underneath it that is not steady at all, the specific quality of a man saying something out loud that he has been carrying silently for a long time. “My health has been deteriorating. I made decisions over the last two years that he disagreed with. He has been collecting documentation, medical records, accounts from people in the household who would say what he needed them to say.” He pauses. “I knew if he found out about you before I reached you, this is exactly what
Selene’s POVI look around the entrance hall at all of them.Mara, who has been present through every single thing this week without being asked, who puts food in front of me and squeezes my hand and says nothing when nothing is what the moment needs. Lucian, who has been learning, slowly and visibly and at real cost to himself, the difference between managing someone and standing beside them. Caden, who drove back through the night and is now standing in a doorway with a lawyer two hours behind him because he decided, again, that leaving easy was not the same as leaving right. Talia, who came in person because letters are easy to ignore. Edrin, who is complicated and present and not entirely clean about either of those things, which puts him in considerable company this week.And Bowen, asleep on the ground floor, who started all of this.“Kitchen,” I say. “All of you. Now.”Nobody argues.This is either a testament to the week we have all survived together or to the specific tone I
Selene’s POVI look at the phone.Everyone in the entrance hall looks at the phone.Eastern territories prefix, unknown number, ringing in my hand at six-thirty in the morning the day after a council hearing and thirty seconds after a man claiming to be my father walked through my front door.I pick up.“Ms. Avery.” The voice is male, older, carrying the clipped eastern accent I have now heard twice in the last twelve hours. Professional, controlled, but underneath it something that has the specific texture of urgency being managed carefully. “My name is Aldric Vane. I am the administrative head of the Calloway family’s eastern council seat.”I look at Edrin Calloway standing four feet from me in my entrance hall.He is watching my face and something in his expression has changed — not guilt exactly, but the specific look of a man who has just realised a variable he was tracking has moved faster than he accounted for.“Mr. Vane,” I say. My voice is even. I am very tired of having to m
Selene’s POVI stare at Lucian.“Talia said he was dead,” I say. My voice comes out flat, which is what happens when my mind is moving faster than my composure can keep up with. “She said he died a year ago. She said he told her about me on his deathbed.”“I know,” Lucian says. “That is what you told me.”“Then who is at the door.”“A man who says his name is Edrin Calloway.”I set my mug down on the desk with more care than the moment requires, because my hands need something deliberate to do, and I stand up and I look at Lucian and I try to find the bottom of what I am feeling and cannot.“Come with me,” I say.He does not hesitate. “Yes.”We go downstairs together, and Mara is in the entrance hall with the expression of a woman who has absorbed a shock and is managing it through the familiar discipline of standing very straight and very still. She looks at me when I appear and her eyes say something like I do not know what this is and I am here regardless, which is the most Mara th
Selene’s POVWe sit in the study until the light outside the window goes fully dark.Not talking about anything important. That is the thing I notice, and keep noticing, because it is new — we have spent this entire week talking about nothing but important things, crisis stacked on crisis, revelation stacked on revelation, and now we are sitting in two chairs in a quiet study and Lucian is telling me about a dispute between two farming families on Ironveil’s eastern boundary that the council mediated last month, and I am listening, and somehow that is exactly what this hour needed.Ordinary things.I have missed ordinary things.At some point Mara brings tea without being asked, looks at the two of us in our separate chairs with the particular brightness of someone trying very hard to have no visible opinion, leaves the tray, and closes the door behind her with exactly the amount of care that tells me she is very pleased about something and is containing it through sheer willpower.“S
Selene’s POVNobody moves.Pack Leader Dain stands at the back of the hearing room with his coat still on and the particular stillness of a man who has made a decision that cost him something and is standing in the aftermath of it. He is older than I expected. Late sixties maybe, broad-shouldered b
Lucian’s POVI look at the phone for three rings.Selene and Caden have both stopped walking. We are standing outside the council building in the cold morning air with twenty minutes until the hearing and my father is calling from the number he has used to send three messages that have each changed
Selene’s POVI reply to the message at half past six.I tell Halsey yes, five minutes, and I tell her I will be at the council’s local office by nine-thirty. She confirms immediately, which means she was waiting for my response, which means whatever she wants to tell me before the hearing she has b
The coffee is always two sugars, no cream.I know this the way I know which floorboard outside his bedroom creaks, which window in the east corridor sticks in the rain, which light switch needs two tries before it catches. Small, useless knowledge that my body collected without my permission. Three







