CHAPTER 04

ELARIS POV

I woke at 3:17 in the morning with my heart slamming against my ribs and my hand already curled around a weapon that did not exist, ten years in Blackthorn had taught my body that the dark was never empty. The room around me was silent and enormous, the white sheets tangled around my legs and the moon laying a pale square across the carpet, and it took me a long, humiliating minute to understand that the sound that had jolted me awake was only the old house settling, not a boot in a corridor or a key scraping in a lock. I sat on the edge of that obscenely soft bed with my feet pressed to the floor, counting my breaths the way I had taught myself to, and I thought how ridiculous it was that freedom could feel so much like a threat. The bed was too wide, the walls too far away, and the quiet too complete, so I dragged the blanket onto the floor beside the window and lay there staring at the stars until the sky bled from black to gray, which was the only way my body knew how to rest.

By seven I was dressed, my hair braided tightly, and standing in the dining room, where the staff set a plate of eggs and fruit in front of me and then withdrew without a single question, as though someone had instructed them to give me the one thing I had gone without for a decade, which was room. Kaiven was already there, sitting at the far end of the long table with a cup of black coffee he had clearly not touched, and the moment I walked in he rose to his feet, kept his distance, and looked at me with that unsettling stillness that made me feel seen all the way down to the bone. He told me he had news, and that he would give it to me exactly as he had received it, without softening it, because he suspected I had had enough of people deciding what I could handle.

My fork stopped halfway to my mouth. "Say it."

"There is no death certificate for your father," he said evenly. "There is no burial permit, no cemetery record, and no funeral home that handled him, and the only paperwork anyone can produce was issued by a private clinic that shut its doors the week you were sentenced. I'm not telling you he's alive, because I don't know that, and I won't build you a hope I can't support. I'm telling you that your question was the right one, and that someone worked very hard to make sure it never got asked."

The room tilted, and for a moment I was nineteen again, writing letters to a father who never answered and telling myself that grief explained the silence. Then something hot and fierce rose through the numbness and settled in my spine, because I had been a good, obedient, grateful girl for eighteen years and it had cost me everything, and I was finished with it. I set down the fork, folded my hands to keep them from shaking, and told him I wanted to go to the county records office myself, today, because I needed my identification, my trial transcripts, and my own two eyes on whatever paper existed. He did not argue, he did not offer to come, and he did not insist on sending a guard, though I saw the effort that restraint cost him in the tightening of his jaw, and he only asked whether I would take a phone so I could reach him if I needed to. I took it, I hated how grateful I felt, and I left before he could say anything that would make me soften.

The records office smelled of dust and burned coffee, and I stood in line for two hours holding a number on a slip of paper, which was the single most familiar humiliation of my life, until a bored clerk finally called me forward and slid a form across the counter without looking up. She kept typing as I gave her my name, and then her fingers stopped, and I watched the color change in her face as she read the screen and slowly lifted her gaze to mine. "Veyne," she said softly, with a little curl of disgust, and then louder, "Elaris Veyne, the poisoner."

The whole room went quiet in the way a pond goes quiet when a stone sinks into it. I felt every pair of eyes in that hall settle on me like a hand on the back of my neck, and a woman near the window snatched her child's arm and pulled him behind her skirt, and a man in a gray suit muttered something about how they let anyone out these days. I could have run, and part of me, the part still living in a cell, begged me to, but I made myself lift my chin and say in a clear, steady voice that I had served my sentence in full, that I was entitled to my documents like any other citizen, and that I would wait as long as it took for her to process my request.

The clerk did process it, slowly and spitefully, but she did, and when I walked out into the thin afternoon sun with a folder against my chest, a stranger in a camel coat stepped into my path and hissed, "Murderer," before tipping a full cup of cold coffee over my head. It dripped down my braid and soaked the navy dress Yseldra had given me, and I stood on that sidewalk with my eyes closed and my fists clenched, shaking, because I wanted to scream that I had loved that man's memory more than anyone alive, that I had never once stopped asking who had done this to us. Instead I wiped my face with my sleeve, walked past her without a word, and found a bench around the corner where I finally let myself breathe, and it was there, with coffee drying sticky on my skin, that I opened the folder and began to read the case file that had stolen my life.

The first twenty pages were exactly what I remembered, the cold, tidy lies stacked neatly one on top of the other, but on page twenty-three, in the margin of a laboratory summary, someone had written a small note in blue ink that made every hair on my arms stand up. It referenced a second food sample, collected from the kitchen counter before the police arrived and logged under a separate evidence number, and beside it, in the same hurried handwriting, were four words that I read once, then again, then a third time with my pulse hammering in my ears: "Not for trial. See O.S."

My phone buzzed in my lap, and Kaiven's name lit the screen, and I stared at the message while the whole world narrowed to that one blinking line of text. It said that his legal team had found the same reference an hour ago, that the sample had never been entered into the trial record, and that he was already on his way to wherever I was, but only if I wanted him to come.