บททั้งหมดของ THE SONGBIRDS CAGE: บทที่ 51 - บทที่ 60

Wren’s POVI call Talia the next morning, desperate for the one voice in my life that has never once asked anything of me beyond friendship, and something in the way she answers a half-second too quickly, a brightness in her voice that doesn’t quite match the hour makes me hesitate before I say anything at all.“You sound busy.”“Just tired. Long shift. What’s going on?”I tell her some of it is not the Voss bloodline, not yet, that revelation still too raw and too dangerous to hand to anyone, even her but enough to need her reassurance, enough to need the sound of someone who loves me uncomplicated by all of this.“You’re being careful, right?” There’s something underneath the question I can’t quite place, an eagerness that doesn’t fit the shape of ordinary worry.“As careful as I can be.”“Good. That’s good, Wren. Just keep me updated. On everything. Okay?”I agree, and we talk a while longer about smaller things, and by the time I hang up I’ve almost convinced myself I imagined the

Wren’s POV“Can I ask you something, and you can tell me it’s none of my business?”“Depends on something.”“Your leg.” He says it plainly, no hesitation, no careful softening around the edges the way most people manage it. “Does it hurt all the time, or just certain kinds of weather, certain kinds of days?”Nobody asks me that. Nobody, in six years, has asked me a single practical question about my own body without wrapping it first in an apology for asking, without flinching slightly at the answer.“Both. Worse in the cold. Worse when I’ve been standing too long. There’s a specific kind of ache some mornings that feels less like pain and more like a memory my body refuses to let go of.”“That sounds exhausting.”“It is.” I study him, waiting for the pity to arrive the way it always does, and it doesn’t come. He just nods, absorbing the information the way he’d absorb any other fact about me, and something in that plainness undoes me more completely than any grand gesture ever could.

ElenaI woke up before he did, which never happened, and for a second I let myself pretend the world hadn't changed.The light coming through the safehouse window was the thin grey kind, the kind that shows up before the sun commits to anything. Kiryan was on his back, one arm flung over his eyes like even sleep couldn't get him to surrender fully. I watched the rise and fall of his chest and thought, stupidly, that I had never seen him breathe like a person before and always controlled. Always metered. Last night he hadn't been.I should have stayed still. Instead I shifted, and the mattress dipped, and his eyes opened.Not slowly. Not soft. All at once, like a switch."You're awake," I said, and immediately hated how small my voice sounded.He didn't answer right away. He looked at me the way he used to look at rooms before he cleared them checking exits, threats, angles. Then something in his jaw tightened and the warmth I'd fallen asleep next to just wasn't there anymore."I have

ElenaHe lasted three days before I stopped waiting for him to come back on his own.Three days of him standing outside my door instead of inside my room. Three days of one-word answers, of "clear," of "eat something," of him treating me like a package he was contracted to deliver undamaged. Three days of watching him fold himself into someone I didn't recognise, someone who used to exist before that night and apparently intended to keep existing now, permanently, like the version of him I'd slept next to had been a stranger wearing his face.I tried, at first, to give him room. I told myself men like Kiryan needed time to process things the rest of us just felt out loud, that maybe silence was simply how he grieved whatever he thought he'd lost by letting himself want me. I brought him coffee the second morning and he took it without meeting my eyes. I left my door unlocked the second night, some small, foolish hope still alive in me that he'd come through it in the dark the way he h

ElenaThe envelope was sitting on the desk in the study when Signora Calvetti, the family's private notary, a woman with the face of someone who has kept secrets for a living her entire career asked me to sit down."Ms Hart," she said, and something about the careful, formal way she used my adopted name made my stomach drop before she said another word. "There's no easy way to walk you through this, so I'm simply going to lay it out."She opened a folder. Inside were photographs, old ones, faded at the edges a woman who could have been my twin standing beside a man I didn't recognise, and behind them, blurry but unmistakable, a crest I'd seen once before, stitched into the lining of an old coat Kiryan kept in his closet and never wore."That crest belongs to the Kozlov family," she said. "You know the name."I did. Everyone in this world knew the name, even those of us who'd spent our whole lives pretending we belonged to a different one. The Kozlovs wiped out, or so the story went, i