All Chapters of THE SONGBIRDS CAGE: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

Wren's POVThe pain starts in my left hip the way it always does a low, patient ache that wakes up about an hour before I do, like it wants a head start. By the time I've pulled myself upright and swung my legs over the edge of the bed, it's already climbed all the way down to my knee, settling in for the night's work.I don't fight it anymore. Fighting it just makes it louder.I wrap my hand around the cane leaning against my nightstand plain, black, no decoration, because decoration invites questions and I stand. There's a rhythm to it now, after six years. Weight on the right. Cane forward. The left leg drags itself into line like it's still deciding whether it wants to cooperate tonight. Some nights it does. Some nights it makes me pay for every step between here and the door.Tonight, it lets me go easy. Small mercies.I don't look in the mirror on my way out. I know what's there, a woman who used to move like water and now moves like something being poured out of a cracked jug,

*Vas's POV*Nobody remembers the second son.That's the first lesson this world ever taught me, back when I was young enough to still believe loyalty got rewarded instead of spent. My father served the old Don for thirty-one years. Thirty-one years of broken knuckles and buried bodies and a devotion so complete it should have bought his family something more than a modest house and a funeral nobody important bothered attending. I stood at that funeral in a borrowed suit and watched the current Don shake exactly four hands before he left, and none of them was mine.I decided that day I would never again be a man whose name people forgot to remember.Fifteen years later, I'm still not the name they remember first. I'm the lieutenant, the fixer, the man who makes uncomfortable things disappear so the men with better origins can keep their hands clean and their consciences cleaner. I've buried more secrets for this family than the ground under Casa Nera has room for. And still, when Dario

*Kiryan's POV*Control is not a personality trait. People like to believe it is that some men are simply born still, born quiet, born capable of standing in a room full of violence without their pulse ever climbing. It isn't true. Control is a wound that is scarred over correctly. It's the thing you build, brick by brick, out of every moment you don't allow yourself to feel what you were feeling, until eventually the wall is so well made that even you start to believe there was never a fire behind it.I have been building that wall for six years.I'm standing across the street from The Blue Note when she leaves tonight, close enough to watch the particular rhythm of her walk weight on the right, cane forward, the left leg following a half-beat behind like it's still negotiating the terms of its teamwork and far enough that she will never once, not in six years, have caught me here.I don't follow her out of duty. Nobody assigned me this. If Dario knew how many nights I've spent standi

Wren’s POVI don’t open the door, not immediately. I stand there with my hand hovering over the latch, listening to the silence on the other side. My heart is beating so hard I can feel it in my throat. Maybe they’ll leave. Maybe if I stay quiet long enough, they’ll get tired of waiting.It’s a stupid thought.I know that.People like this don’t knock on your door and leave because you didn’t answer. They wait. I’ve learned that the hard way. Talia’s fingers slip into mine.They’re cold.I squeeze them.She squeezes back. For a second, neither of us moves, then I take a breath and open the door. Two men are standing outside, neither one introduces himself. The taller one is dressed simply, but there’s something about the way he stands that tells me he isn’t worried about anything. Not the hallway. Not me. Not what might happen next. The other man says nothing. He just looks at me. Not at my face, but at everything.His eyes move over my cane, my leg, then back to my face. I hate the wa

*Wren's POV*I put the dress on for the first time three hours before I needed to, just to see if I can still stand to look at myself in something beautiful.The zipper sticks halfway, the way everything about my body has learned to stick and drag and negotiate since the accident, and by the time I finally get it fastened, my hands are shaking for reasons that have nothing to do with the effort. I stand in front of my cracked bathroom mirror in a gown clearly made for a woman who is allowed to feel beautiful without flinching, and the girl staring back at me from the glass drags me, without permission, into a memory I have spent years trying to keep buried.I'm twenty. Eleven months since the accident. Delia has been begging me for weeks to come to the Hensley Foundation benefit a small, glittering fundraiser for arts scholarships, exactly the kind of room I used to belong in before I belonged nowhere at all and I finally say yes because some stubborn, wounded part of me still believe