جميع فصول : الفصل -الفصل 26

Selene’s POVI am already moving before Lucian fully turns around.The sentinel is at the edge of the tree line, near the path that runs along the outer wall toward the east wing, and he is not doing anything that would look wrong to a casual glance. Standing. Watching the house. The posture of a man waiting for instructions rather than a man who got left behind by accident.Nobody gets left behind by accident in a convoy like that.“He came with your father,” I say, keeping my voice low. “Which means he either has instructions to wait, or he was told to stay regardless of how the conversation went.”Lucian’s jaw is tight. “Or Corrin told him to.”Corrin.I had almost let myself forget, for the length of that conversation at the gate, that there is a man sitting in Lucian’s study chair with a filed petition on the arm of his chair and an unfinished gesture toward his coat that Mara’s voice interrupted.“Corrin is still upstairs,” I say.Lucian’s eyes go to the house. To the study wind

Selene’s POVHe talks for longer than I expected.Not in a way that drags. In a way that costs him, visibly, sentence by sentence, like a man walking across ground that keeps shifting under his feet and refusing to stop walking anyway. He tells the pack about the clearing. About what he said, almost word for word, and I watch several people in the crowd flinch at hearing it spoken aloud in his own voice, in this hall, three months later.He does not soften it.That is the thing I notice most. Bowen’s original plan, the one from the corridor this morning, had a shape to it — an Alpha who recognised his error, words chosen to manage a narrative. What Lucian is doing now does not have that shape. He says the word cruel about his own choice. He says I was wrong without qualifying it, without immediately following it with what he has learned, the way people do when they want credit for the lesson before they have finished admitting the mistake.He talks about his father last.He does not n

Selene’s POVI do not sleep much again.This is becoming a pattern I do not like, but for once the reason is not entirely bad. Last night, after the hall emptied and Halsey’s attendants had been settled into the east wing — the same wing Caden’s delegation occupied, which feels significant in a way I do not have time to examine — I lay in my room replaying the applause. The sound of it. The healer near the front, clapping first, before anyone else dared.Three months of being a ghost in this house, and last night I was not one.I get up before five anyway. Old habit. I make coffee for the study out of pure muscle memory before I remember that this morning is different, that I am not bringing it to Lucian, that I have somewhere else to be.I bring it anyway. I leave it on his desk. Two sugars, no cream.Some things do not need to change just because everything else is.Halsey has set up in one of the smaller meeting rooms off the main hall — not the study, not anywhere that belongs to