The last bell rings, and the school empties into the afternoon in one loud, careless rush.
Students spill through the front doors in clumps and crooked lines, voices overlapping, backpacks thudding against shoulders, locker doors still slamming in distant bursts somewhere farther down the hall. The whole place seems to exhale them at once. It should feel ordinary. It should feel irritating in the familiar way it always does at the end of the day.
Instead, to Seina, it feels wrong.
Not because anything obvious is out of place. The sky is pale and thinning toward evening, the parking lot half-full, the front steps crowded with people already halfway into conversations that have nothing to do with school. A group of girls laugh too hard near the bike rack. Someone calls out for a ride. A teacher stands by the doors with the exhausted expression of someone pretending they still have authority for the next thirty seconds.
Everything looks normal.
That’s what makes the unease worse.
Seina lingers near the bottom of the front steps, her bag hanging from one shoulder, fingers lightly hooked through the strap. She doesn’t pace. She doesn’t keep checking her phone every ten seconds. She just watches the street with a stillness that would look patient to anyone who didn’t know her.
Faylan is late.
That thought lands differently every time it circles back.
Late is not impossible. Faylan gets distracted. Faylan changes direction halfway through a plan because something louder, stranger, or more urgent catches her attention. Faylan says she’ll be there in ten minutes and arrives in twenty with a story and an attitude and no apology worth trusting.
But this is not that.
Not after yesterday.
Not after the blood and the silence and the look on Faylan’s face this morning—the one she had tried to hide from their father and failed to hide from Seina.
“She’s probably just behind traffic.”
Emerson’s voice comes from beside her, calm enough to sound almost casual if she didn’t know him better.
Seina glances sideways. He stands one step higher than she does, as if he never fully commits to being where everyone else is. One hand is in his pocket, the other holding the strap of his bag loosely against his chest. His face gives nothing away at first glance, but his eyes are on the road too, and they are far too focused for the reassurance he just offered to mean anything.
“She said she’d come,” Seina says quietly.
Emerson nods once.
“I know.”
That’s all.
No soft lie. No easy comfort.
Just acknowledgement.
Seina looks back toward the road. Cars pass in slow intervals. Parents pull in and out of the pickup lane. A boy jogs across the lot after nearly being left behind by his friends. Everything keeps moving the way it should, and still that strange empty feeling in her chest keeps widening instead of settling.
It isn’t panic.
Not yet.
It’s absence.
A gap where something familiar should be.
Faylan’s presence has never been quiet. Even when she isn’t speaking, even when she’s across a room or upstairs or standing at the sink half-awake in the morning, she feels like movement. Heat. Noise waiting to happen. Seina has always known where to place her in the world without thinking too hard about it.
Now she can’t.
That realization presses coldly under her ribs.
Before she can say anything else, a dark car pulls up along the curb.
Relief rises so quickly it almost hurts.
Then dies just as fast.
It isn’t Faylan’s.
Seina straightens.
Rowan kills the engine and gets out in one smooth movement, shutting the door behind him with more force than he probably means to. He looks the same at first—dark jacket, sleeves pushed up, that quiet contained way of moving like the world around him is always one beat slower than he is. But the sameness doesn’t last past the first second.
There’s something wrong in the control.
It’s too tight.
Too deliberate.
He doesn’t pause to scan the crowd. He doesn’t need to. His eyes find them instantly, and the expression on his face is composed enough that anyone else would miss what’s underneath it.
Seina doesn’t miss it.
That little hard line through the mouth.
The way his shoulders are set.
The way he looks like someone who has already ruled out the version of events where everything is fine.
“Where’s Faylan?” she asks the moment he reaches them.
No hello.
No easing into it.
Just the question she already knows she isn’t going to like the answer to.
Rowan stops in front of them, his gaze flicking once from Seina to Emerson and back again. He does not waste time pretending.
“She didn’t come.”
Seina’s fingers tighten on her bag strap.
“She said she would.”
“I know.”
Again, those two words.
Again, wrong.
She feels Emerson shift beside her, the smallest change in posture, more attention than movement.
“Then why are you here,” Seina asks.
Rowan looks at her fully now, and for one brief second she sees something she has never seen in him before—not fear exactly, but a strain close enough to it to make her stomach drop.
“Get in the car,” he says.
The words are quiet.
Firm.
Wrong in the way only a calm voice can be when it stops trying to soften anything.
Seina doesn’t move.
Neither does Emerson.
The noise of the school continues around them, but it feels farther away now, strangely muffled, like the three of them have stepped into some thin space just to the side of ordinary life where only this matters.
“What happened,” Seina asks.
Rowan’s jaw tightens slightly.
“I don’t know yet.”
That should help.
It doesn’t.
Because he says yet.
Because he says it like there is already a line connecting Faylan’s absence to something bad enough that certainty is only a matter of time.
Emerson is the one who moves first. He takes one step down, not toward the car but toward Rowan, and there is something sharp and assessing in his gaze now that makes him look older than he did a minute ago.
“You felt something,” he says.
Not a question.
Rowan doesn’t answer immediately, which is answer enough.
Seina’s chest tightens further.
“Emerson—”
“She’s not where she should be,” Rowan says, cutting across before either of them can take the question any farther in front of half the student body. “And we are not standing here while I explain that twice.”
There’s no anger in it.
That makes it worse.
Seina looks at him for another long second, searching his face for some lie she can use, some reassurance he isn’t giving properly, some version of Rowan that still belongs to easy things.
She doesn’t find one.
So she gets in the car.
The door shuts with a heavier sound than it should. Emerson slides into the back seat a second later, and Rowan is behind the wheel almost before she has her bag settled. The engine starts. The car pulls away from the curb too smoothly, too quickly, and within seconds the school is already shrinking in the side mirror.
No one speaks at first.
The silence is dense with things all three of them are trying not to say too soon. The streets around the school are busy in the irritating, slow way afternoon traffic always is, but Rowan threads through them with a precision that makes every other driver look half-asleep. He doesn’t speed recklessly. He doesn’t need to. There is something much more unnerving in the way he moves through the roads like he has already chosen the fastest line home and the rest of the town simply has to make room for it.
Seina stares out the windshield, but she isn’t really seeing the road.
That hollow feeling is worse now.
Not sharper. Wider.
Faylan should be somewhere in it, bright and impossible and too much. Instead there is only blankness where her sister should be, and Seina hates how quickly her mind starts filling that blankness with every terrible thing it can imagine.
“She wouldn’t just leave,” she says softly.
The words are meant for herself as much as anyone else.
Rowan’s hands tighten once on the wheel.
“No,” he says.
Emerson leans slightly forward from the back seat.
His voice is low when he speaks, but there is no softness in it.
“She either chose not to be found,” he says, “or she found something first.”
Seina closes her eyes for half a second.
Neither possibility comforts her.
She turns her head just enough to look at Rowan’s profile. The line of his jaw is too hard, his focus too narrow. The blood gem at his throat catches a flash of pale light as they turn at an intersection, dark red for a second before shadow takes it again.
“Are you going to tell us what you know,” she asks quietly, “or are we waiting until we get home for that too.”
Rowan doesn’t answer right away.
When he does, his voice is flatter than before.
“I know she isn’t at the house,” he says. “I know she didn’t answer her phone. And I know Faylan doesn’t miss something she promised you without a reason.”
Seina looks down at her hands.
That lands harder than she wants it to.
Because it’s true.
Because Faylan would forget herself before she forgot Seina.
The car turns onto their street.
Everything outside looks exactly the same as it always does—lawns, driveways, curtains half-drawn against the lowering light. Their house comes into view at the end of the block, warm in the windows, still from the outside, innocent in a way that immediately feels false.
Seina knows before they even stop that Faylan isn’t there.
She doesn’t know how she knows.
She only does.
And when Rowan pulls into the driveway and kills the engine, the silence that falls over the car feels less like an end and more like the second before something breaks.
No one moves right away.
The house sits in front of them with its porch light still off, the curtains half-drawn, the familiar shape of home somehow feeling wrong just by being too unchanged. The yard looks the same. The steps look the same. Even the old branch near the side of the house knocks once in the wind with that same uneven rhythm it always has. Everything about it says ordinary.
Seina hates that.
Because Faylan should be inside.
She should be pacing the kitchen with too much energy and not enough patience, or upstairs with music low in the background, or leaning against the hallway table pretending she hadn’t scared everyone half to death by being late. She should be somewhere in the shape of the house, loud even when quiet.
Instead there is only that same hollow absence pressing under Seina’s ribs.
Rowan is the first to move. He gets out of the car in one smooth motion and shuts the door behind him with more control than calm. Emerson is already halfway out of the back seat by the time Seina reaches for the handle, his expression set into that unnerving stillness he gets when he is watching too many things at once.
The gravel shifts softly under their shoes as they cross the driveway.
No one speaks.
Not because there is nothing to say.
Because none of them wants to be the one to give shape to what this might mean before they absolutely have to.
Seina reaches the porch first and stops with her hand on the knob, her pulse suddenly too loud in her ears. The door is unlocked.
That, for some reason, is what makes her chest tighten harder.
Faylan never leaves things open unless she means to come back fast.
She pushes the door open.
The house breathes cool air at them from the dim front hall, quiet and settled in the way only occupied homes can be. A lamp is on in the living room, throwing a soft gold wash across the floorboards. Daniel is not home yet. The kitchen beyond is still, the last traces of breakfast long gone. Nothing looks disturbed. Nothing looks wrong.
It is almost worse than if the place had been torn apart.
“She could still be here,” Seina says, though the words feel thin even as she speaks them.
Rowan steps inside behind her. He pauses just past the threshold, his gaze moving once through the room with quick, practiced precision.
“No,” he says quietly.
He doesn’t say it cruelly.
He says it like fact.
Seina turns toward him, irritation flaring up through the fear before she can stop it.
“You don’t know that.”
Rowan’s eyes shift to her for half a second, and there is something in them that makes the argument die before it fully starts.
“I do.”
Emerson has already moved farther into the house, slow and deliberate, his attention not on the obvious spaces but on the edges of them—the hallway table, the staircase, the place near the banister where Faylan always tossed her jacket, the kitchen entry, the air itself.
He walks toward the stairs without waiting for either of them, and that is enough to send a different kind of dread through the room.
Seina follows first.
Fast.
Not running yet, but close.
The stairs creak beneath all three of them as they go up, the house seeming to notice them in the same old familiar ways. Seina hates how normal it all still sounds. Hates that this staircase, this hallway, these walls have held every version of their life and are saying nothing useful now.
Faylan’s door is half-open.
That stops Seina cold for one sharp second.
Because Faylan almost never leaves it like that.
Rowan notices too. She feels it in the shift of him behind her, the way his attention narrows, his control tightening into something harder.
Seina pushes the door wider.
The room is not wrecked.
That is the first thing she sees.
Not a struggle. Not violence. Not panic frozen into objects.
But it is wrong.
The bed is unmade in that careless way it would be if Faylan had gotten up too fast and never circled back. One dresser drawer is left slightly open. The curtain by the window is crooked from being pulled aside too hard. A glass with a little water still in the bottom sits on the desk near a brush and a half-folded shirt. Small things. Normal things.
But the chair by the desk is empty.
So is the hook by the door.
And the bag Faylan always uses for work, and everything in between—
is gone.
Seina feels the realization before she fully thinks it.
“She packed.”
The words leave her softly.
Not because she is trying to be quiet.
Because speaking louder would make it too real.
Emerson steps farther into the room, his gaze sweeping over everything with that same exacting attention that never seems to miss what matters. He touches nothing at first. He just looks.
Then he crouches near the dresser, glances once at the open drawer, and stands again.
“Not much,” he says. “Just enough.”
Rowan remains near the doorway for half a second longer than necessary, and in that pause Seina sees it—that moment where something in him goes very, very still.
Not indecision.
Recognition.
The room had already told him what he needed to know the second he stepped in. Now it is only confirming the shape of it.
“She chose to leave,” Emerson says.
Seina turns sharply. “No.”
He looks at her, not cold, not dismissive—just unwilling to lie.
“She wasn’t dragged out,” he says. “Nothing’s overturned. No broken line of movement. No defensive disruption.” His gaze flicks once toward the empty space near the chair. “She took what she needed.”
Seina’s chest tightens painfully.
“But she wouldn’t just go.”
Not without telling her.
Not after this morning.
Not after everything.
That is the part she cannot force around.
Rowan finally steps fully into the room. The floorboard beneath his weight gives a small sound, and that, for some reason, breaks the frozen edge of the moment more than anything else has.
He crosses to the bed and stops there, his gaze dropping to the rumpled blanket, the desk, the open drawer, the empty place the bag should have been. He doesn’t touch anything either. He doesn’t need to.
His jaw tightens.
“She found an answer,” he says.
Seina looks at him immediately.
“What does that mean.”
Rowan lifts his eyes, and there is something darker in them now. Not panic. Not yet. But the kind of certainty that comes when fear has already chosen a direction.
“It means she didn’t run,” he says. “She went somewhere.”
A pause.
Then, lower—
“And I know where she’d start.”
Emerson’s attention sharpens at once. “The twins.”
Rowan doesn’t answer.
He doesn’t need to.
Seina feels her stomach drop.
Because of course.
Of course Faylan would go toward the thing instead of away from it. Of course she would hear danger and turn it into direction. It is so horribly, unmistakably her that Seina almost hates her for one bright, terrified second.
“She went alone,” Seina says.
The words come out breathless.
Wrong.
Impossible.
Rowan’s expression hardens further.
“Yes.”
That one word carries too much with it.
Not just anger.
Something older.
Something close to fear in a shape Rowan probably wouldn’t call by name even if it bit him.
He turns abruptly and heads for the door.
Seina reacts instantly. “Where are you going?”
“To get her.”
No hesitation.
No room for discussion.
He says it like the decision was made the second he saw the missing bag.
Emerson steps between him and the hallway before Rowan reaches the threshold, not enough to block him physically, but enough to make the space acknowledge him.
“And if she isn’t with them,” Emerson says.
Rowan stops.
The room tightens around that question.
Because it matters.
Because rushing blind only works when you are willing to hit the wrong thing hard enough to call it progress.
Rowan looks at him once, and Seina realizes then just how close to the edge he is—how little of the easy teasing steadiness she is used to is left in him now.
“Then I go to my house,” he says. “Or the shop. Or anywhere else they’d drag answers before giving them.”
There is no softness in him now.
No ease.
Only direction.
Emerson studies him for another second.
Then nods once, sharp and brief.
“I’ll check the shop.”
Seina turns toward him. “Alone?”
He gives her a look that says the question itself is unnecessary.
“I’ll be faster.”
That is probably true.
It doesn’t help.
Seina looks between the two of them, the room feeling suddenly too small for the speed everything is trying to move at. Her pulse is racing now, the quiet dread from the school steps sharpened into something far more immediate.
“We’re not splitting up.”
“Yes, we are,” Rowan says.
The answer comes too fast.
Too final.
Seina stares at him. “You don’t get to just decide that.”
His gaze cuts to her, and what she sees there makes the next words catch in her throat.
Not anger.
Not even irritation.
Resolve stripped bare.
“She is already alone,” he says quietly. “I’m not wasting time pretending that makes any of us safer.”
That lands hard enough to hurt.
Because it is cruel.
Because it is true.
Seina’s fingers curl at her sides, nails pressing lightly into her palms. For a second she thinks she might argue anyway, just out of sheer refusal to let the room become this kind of place. But the look on Rowan’s face tells her it would do nothing. This is not a conversation he is having. It is a line he is already moving through.
Emerson reaches for the strap of his bag and adjusts it once across his shoulder.
“I’ll call if I find anything.”
Rowan nods without looking at him.
He is already halfway gone in his own head.
Seina hates that too.
Hates how quickly the house has stopped being home and turned into a map of exits.
They move fast after that.
Too fast.
Seina follows them both downstairs because standing alone in Faylan’s room feels impossible now, as if the empty space there might start speaking if she gives it long enough. The front hall feels colder than before. The whole house does. Emerson heads for the side table where the keys were left, then changes his mind and reaches for his phone instead. Rowan goes straight for the front door.
Seina is barely two steps behind him when he opens it and steps out onto the porch.
The evening air has deepened while they were upstairs. The light is dimmer now, the sky sliding toward that bruised gray-blue just before proper dark. The street beyond the yard is mostly quiet. A few porch lights have come on up and down the block. Somewhere in the distance, a dog barks once and then stops.
Rowan takes one step off the porch.
Then stops.
Not because he changed his mind.
Because something stopped him.
Seina feels it before she sees it—that strange little shift in the air, not loud, not violent, but deliberate enough to make the night itself seem to pull tighter around the front walk.
Rowan’s whole body goes still.
Emerson, just behind them, lifts his head sharply.
“Well. This is awkward.”
The voice slides across the front yard like something poured instead of spoken.
Seina feels it first in her skin.
Not the words themselves.
The way they arrive.
Too smooth. Too warm. Too deliberate in all the places a normal voice would break against the edges of the world. It makes the night around them feel thinner somehow, as though the dark has leaned closer just to hear itself better.
Rowan goes utterly still.
Not the casual stillness Seina has seen a hundred times before, the kind that belonged to patience or quiet amusement or that lazy, dangerous ease he wore like he had all the time in the world.
This is different.
This is impact.
His shoulders lock. His head tilts just slightly, as if hearing something impossible and hating that he heard it at all. Even from behind, Seina can see it—the fracture in his composure, narrow but immediate, like a crack running through ice that had looked solid a second earlier.
Emerson steps down off the porch beside Seina, his gaze sharpening toward the edge of the yard where the porch light gives up and shadow takes over. His whole body changes in one breath, not afraid, not startled, just ready in that unsettling way of his that never looks dramatic and always looks serious.
The woman moves into the light slowly.
Not because she needs to.
Because she knows exactly what she’s doing.
She steps out from the dark with the kind of control that makes every movement feel practiced—not stiff, not artificial, just too aware of how it lands. She is beautiful in a way Seina instantly dislikes. Not because beauty itself is dangerous, but because this kind is. Dark hair spills over one shoulder in loose waves that catch the porch light with a deep blue-black sheen. Her dress is the wrong kind of elegant for the front yard of a family home in Greythorne, cut in dark fabric that moves like water around her legs. Her mouth is curved in something that isn’t quite a smile and definitely isn’t kindness.
But it’s her eyes that stop Seina.
Not red.
Not human either.
There is something old and bright and terribly certain in them, and when they settle first on Rowan instead of the rest of them, the expression they carry is so intimate in its recognition that Seina feels like she has walked into the middle of a conversation that started years before she was born.
Rowan says nothing for a full second.
Then, very quietly—
“You’re dead.”
The woman’s smile shifts.
Not wider.
Sharper.
“Yes,” she says, her voice still carrying that strange liquid pull. “That was the general impression, wasn’t it.”
Seina looks at Rowan immediately.
Not because of the words.
Because of his face.
She has never seen him look like this.
Never.
The usual smooth edges of him are gone. Not dropped entirely, but stripped thin enough that what’s underneath finally shows—shock first, then something harsher, older, and far more dangerous than the easy wit and calm he wears around them. His jaw tightens so sharply it changes the whole line of his face. There’s no warmth in him now. No softness. Only a terrifying kind of focus that makes him look less like Rowan and more like whatever Rowan becomes when the part of him that was once human stops trying to be polite.
And somehow that is worse than fear.
The woman’s gaze drifts from him at last and lands on Seina.
The shift is immediate.
Seina feels it like fingers at the edge of her throat.
Nothing physical touches her. Nothing visible moves. But suddenly the air around the woman’s voice grows heavier, sweeter, threaded with something that seems to slip around Seina’s thoughts rather than strike them outright. It isn’t compulsion the way Valen’s had been, not that cold pressure forcing the mind into obedience.
This is softer.
Which makes it more frightening.
“You must be Seina,” the woman says.
Her name sounds wrong in that voice. Too cherished. Too deliberate.
Seina’s shoulders tense.
Before she can answer, Rowan steps forward.
Not much.
Just enough to break the line between them.
The movement is so fast and instinctive it doesn’t look chosen at all. One second the woman is looking directly at Seina. The next Rowan is there, body angled between them, every inch of him saying no before he ever opens his mouth.
“Don’t.”
The word comes out low.
Deadly in a way Seina has never heard from him.
The woman’s gaze lifts back to Rowan, and for one strange suspended second, delight moves through her expression like a shadow.
“There you are,” she murmurs.
Seina feels something in her chest tighten.
Because that tone—
that is not a stranger’s tone.
That is not a random emissary delivering a threat.
Whatever this is, it’s personal.
Emerson notices too. She can feel it in the way his attention shifts—not just toward the woman, but toward Rowan himself, reevaluating, recalculating.
“Shea,” Rowan says.
The name lands like a stone dropped into still water.
Not because Seina knows it.
Because Rowan does.
And because of the way he says it—no confusion left now, no disbelief, only recognition sharpened into hostility.
Shea inclines her head, almost graceful.
“I was wondering when you’d believe your own eyes.”
“You shouldn’t be here.”
A small, amused breath leaves her.
“That would matter more if I had any interest in your rules.”
She takes another step toward the porch, and this time Emerson moves too, not ahead of Rowan but closer to Seina, subtle enough that anyone not paying attention might miss it. Seina doesn’t miss it. Suddenly the front yard feels crowded with invisible lines, everyone shifting into place around a conflict she still doesn’t fully understand.
Rowan’s voice goes quieter.
Which, Seina is realizing with growing dread, is when it becomes most dangerous.
“Say what you came to say and leave.”
Shea’s eyes flick down the line of him, taking in the tension in his body, the absolute refusal in the set of his shoulders. There is something almost thoughtful in her expression now, as if she is comparing this Rowan to one she used to know and finding the differences interesting.
“That’s no way to greet someone you mourned so beautifully,” she says.
Seina’s breath catches.
She looks at Rowan again, fast, instinctive, trying to read the truth of that in his face.
He does not look at her.
But his hand tightens at his side, fingers curling once hard enough that she sees the motion even in the low light.
Whatever Rowan used to be to this woman—
it mattered.
And whatever she used to be to him—
it still does.
Not love, Seina thinks immediately, almost defensively.
Then just as quickly: maybe not in a way she understands.
Shea’s attention returns to Seina.
This time when she speaks, the sweetness in her voice deepens, and Seina feels the edge of it brush against her thoughts again like velvet laid over a knife.
“You don’t belong here, darling.”
The words are almost gentle.
That is what makes Emerson step fully in front of Seina’s shoulder.
Not blocking Rowan.
Shielding her.
“Try that again,” he says, and his tone is flat in a way that somehow feels more threatening than if he had shouted.
Shea’s gaze shifts to him for the first time with real interest.
“And you must be the witch.”
Emerson says nothing.
He doesn’t need to.
The front porch light glints faintly off the edges of his expression, making him look younger and far older at the same time.
Shea lets her eyes move between them all once, reading the arrangement with unnerving ease.
“You’ve made a lovely little wall,” she says. “I’m touched.”
“No,” Rowan says. “You’re trespassing.”
She laughs softly.
The sound of it makes Seina’s skin crawl.
“Still so dramatic.”
“Still breathing, despite the inconvenience.”
That wipes the humor from her mouth.
For the first time since stepping into the light, something colder shows through.
Good, Seina thinks suddenly, fiercely.
Because she is tired of being spoken to like she is too young to hear the danger in a beautiful voice.
Shea folds her hands loosely in front of her and lets the silence stretch just long enough to feel intentional.
Then she says, “I didn’t come for a fight.”
“No,” Rowan replies. “You came for her.”
The words crack open what little pretense was left.
Seina goes cold all at once.
Shea doesn’t deny it.
In fact, something almost like relief settles into her face, as if she’s pleased someone had the decency to say it aloud.
“I came to spare everyone the unpleasant version,” she says. “That seems generous, considering the alternatives.”
Rowan takes one more step off the porch.
Now there is no distance at all between what Seina is seeing and the truth of it: Rowan is angry. Not the easy irritation she’s watched him wear when Faylan teases him or when Daniel pretends not to notice what he is. Not the controlled wariness from the school pickup.
This is rage contained so tightly it has become stillness.
“Leave,” he says.
Shea’s eyes remain on Seina.
“That would be easier,” she says softly, “if you’d stop pretending the secondborn is safe here.”
Seina’s pulse stumbles.
Secondborn.
The word hits with all the ugly clarity the journal had carried when Faylan read it. She can feel Emerson tense beside her. She can feel Rowan turn harder somehow, like even hearing Seina named that way is enough to sharpen every dangerous thing in him.
“She comes with me,” Shea says. “Or Vespera sends someone less patient next time.”
The night seems to narrow around the sentence.
No one moves.
Not because no one wants to.
Because they all do.
Seina’s mouth goes dry. She can feel her own heartbeat too high in her throat, and beneath that, under the fear, something else—an awful quiet certainty that this moment is tilting toward something none of them are going to stop cleanly.
Rowan speaks first.
And when he does, his voice is so cold that Seina almost doesn’t recognize it.
“You do not say her name.”
Shea’s head tilts.
A small motion.
Curious.
“Or what.”
Seina does not think she has ever seen anyone ask that question and mean it quite so much.
Rowan’s face changes.
Not dramatically.
Not monstrously.
Just enough.
Enough that the last traces of the man who leaned on their porch and let Faylan ask dangerous questions feel very far away.
Enough that Seina suddenly sees him the way the rest of the world probably does when it stops mistaking him for safe.
“I stop being polite,” he says.
Shea smiles.
And somehow that is the most frightening thing of all.