WHERE LIGHT MEETS DARK
"I feel… vulnerable. Like I just handed them the knife and walked away."
Vandaulf moved closer. "They've owned the knife for years, Lily. The difference is… now you're not afraid of it."
She looked for doubt in his face and found none—only intense, silent fidelity. That same elusive consistency he always possessed, the one she had despised, envied, required.
"I thought it would be revenge," she acknowledged. "But it was… mourning."
"It is mourning," he replied. "But it's also birth."
She took a tremulous breath, eyes flicking to their image in the elevator's mirrored walls. Lily James—precise, elegant, impossibly alive—and next to her, the man once created out of the bloodline which sought t