บททั้งหมดของ THE SONGBIRDS CAGE: บทที่ 31 - บทที่ 40

Wren's POVDario shows up at breakfast the next morning early for him, if Talia's teasing about men who treat mornings like a personal insult is any measure balancing two cups of coffee like he's carrying something breakable."I don't actually know how you take it," he admits, setting both cups down. "So. Options."The ledger is still sitting behind my ribs like a stone I swallowed and can't quite digest, but something about the sight of him fumbling this small, ordinary gesture pulls a reluctant tug at the corner of my mouth anyway. "That's either very thoughtful or very inefficient.""With me, it's usually both." He sits, and there's a stiffness to him this morning that isn't performance more like a man trying on honesty the way you try on a coat two sizes too formal, unsure yet whether it'll fit. His eyes flick toward the window, toward the grounds where an attack nearly ended me only nights ago, and something tightens in his jaw. "I've been thinking about Delancy Street. I should'

Wren's POVTalia comes two days later, and I use Dario's small grants of freedom to arrange it. I'm not entirely proud of exploiting, but some things feel too dangerous to trust to a phone line I can't be sure isn't monitored.She arrives wide-eyed, glancing around the entrance hall like a woman who's spent her whole life carefully avoiding exactly this kind of wealth, and the second we're alone she pulls me into a hug hard enough to nearly knock the cane out of my hand."This place is insane," she whispers. "What have you gotten yourself into?""More than I know how to explain," I admit, and I finally tell her not everything, some instinct still holding the deepest layer back but enough. Delancy Street. Kiryan's confession. The ledger. The initials. The sick, growing certainty that the house sheltering me may have ordered its own destruction of my life.She listens, going paler by the minute, and when I finish she sits heavily on the edge of the bed, quietly recalculating everything

Wren's POVHis mouth meets mine before I've fully decided to let it, and for one suspended, breathless second I forget every reason I had to be careful.It isn't the practised, performative kiss I'd have expected from a man who's charmed rooms full of strangers his whole life. It's clumsy uncertain, his hand trembling slightly against my jaw, like some part of him can't quite believe he's being allowed this. Six years of careful isolation crack open all at once, and for three, four, five long seconds I let myself want it, completely.Then reality slams back in, and I pull away."I " My voice comes out unsteady, my hand rising to my own lips like I could hold the sensation there a second longer even while stepping back from it. "I can't. Not like this. Not with everything I still don't understand."His face falls, then recovers, old practised composure sliding back even while his eyes stay unmistakably raw. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have""It's not that I didn't want it." The honesty sur

Kiryan’s POVI stayed in the shadow of the broken fountain. Water hadn’t run there in years. The courtyard was empty except for the two of them under the half-dead olive tree. One working lamp over the side door caught the side of her face when she tilted it up.I saw her shoulders drop. The hand that still shook when she thought no one noticed rose and rested on his chest as it belonged there. Then his head came down.I didn’t look away.The kiss wasn’t hungry. It was quiet. Certain. The kind of certainty that settles in a man’s bones and tells him he’s already taken something. Her fingers curled into his shirt. His hand found the small of her back and stayed. When they broke apart she didn’t step back. She stayed close enough that their breath still mixed in the cold.Something heavy moved through my chest. Not heat. Not the sharp kind of anger I knew how to use. Heavier. I’d known this could happen. I’d watched the way she looked at him when the room was empty. I heard the softness

Her POVThe file shouldn’t have been in the archive at all.I found it by accident on the third night I spent alone in the lower records room, the one that still smelled of dust and old paper and the faint chemical tang of documents that had been meant to disappear. Most of the boxes were labelled with dates and syndicate codes that meant nothing to me anymore. This one had no label. Only a thin red string tied around it in a knot that looked almost careless.Inside were three photographs, a short typed report, and a single page of handwritten notes in a hand I recognised from the old days. My uncle’s hand. The man who’d raised me after my parents died and who’d taught me that loyalty was the only currency that never lost its value.The photographs were of the warehouse where the “accident” happened. The one that left me with a ruined left leg and a life that no longer belonged to the family that had once claimed me. The angles were wrong for official investigation photos. Too close.