For the first time since she woke, she thought about her father.
And everything she’d left behind.
The thought doesn’t come gently.
It hits like something breaking the surface after being held under too long, sudden and disorienting and impossible to ignore once it’s there. One second Seina is standing in the quiet aftermath of Kael leaving, the next she’s somewhere else entirely—kitchen light, her father’s voice, the ordinary rhythm of a life that had rules she understood.
The contrast is enough to make her feel off balance again.
Not physically.
She’s starting to realize that might not happen the way it used to.
Emotionally.
That still works.
The door closes with a soft, final sound behind Rowan, sealing the dawn out and the room in. For a moment, neither of them speaks. The air feels heavier now, the absence of Kael settling into the space he left behind in a way Seina can’t quite name but definitely feels.
She turns away from the door first.
Not because she wants to.
Because she has to.
Because if she stands there any longer, she might go after him, and she doesn’t trust what that decision would look like now.
She takes a few steps deeper into the room instead.
Slow.
Measured.
Trying to feel like she’s choosing something instead of reacting to everything.
It doesn’t work.
Not fully.
Because the second she puts space between herself and Rowan, she notices it.
The shift.
Subtle.
But there.
That strange, quiet pull that had been sitting under her skin since he touched her wrist loosens just slightly, like a thread going slack. It doesn’t disappear. It doesn’t vanish.
It just—
Eases.
Seina stops mid-step.
Her brows knit together.
That’s not normal.
She takes another step forward.
Farther from him.
The feeling lessens again.
Not gone.
But quieter.
Her heart should react to that realization.
It doesn’t.
Nothing in her chest moves.
But something else does.
Something sharper.
More aware.
She turns slowly.
Rowan hasn’t moved from the door.
He’s watching her.
Seina studies him for a second, then deliberately takes a step back toward him.
The shift is immediate.
The pull tightens again, subtle but undeniable, settling back into place like something correcting itself.
Her stomach drops.
“Don’t do that.”
The words come out before she can soften them.
Rowan’s expression doesn’t change.
“Do what.”
Seina lets out a short breath, frustrated.
“That,” she says, gesturing vaguely between them. “Whatever this is.”
His gaze sharpens slightly.
But he doesn’t answer.
That silence tells her more than anything he could’ve said.
Seina crosses her arms.
“You felt that, right.”
Not a question.
A challenge.
Rowan exhales slowly, like he’s choosing how much truth to give her and how much to keep.
“I felt you move,” he says.
“That’s not what I meant.”
“I know.”
She hates that he keeps making her drag things out into the open when he already understands them.
“Then stop pretending you don’t,” she snaps.
The edge in her voice cuts through the room cleanly, sharper than anything she’s said since waking.
Rowan doesn’t flinch.
Doesn’t rise to it.
If anything, he goes more still.
“I’m not pretending,” he says evenly.
Seina stares at him.
“Then explain it.”
Another pause.
Short.
Controlled.
Careful.
“It’s not something you need to focus on right now.”
That does it.
Seina lets out a humorless laugh and drops her arms.
“That’s not an explanation,” she says. “That’s avoidance.”
“It’s prioritization.”
“It’s irritating.”
That almost pulls something from him again, the faintest flicker of something that might have been amusement in another moment.
It disappears quickly.
“You’re unstable,” he says instead.
Seina goes still.
Not because she doesn’t believe it.
Because hearing it out loud feels different.
Sharper.
More final.
“I’m standing here,” she says slowly. “I’m not attacking you. I’m not tearing through the house looking for blood. I’m not—” She stops, jaw tightening. “How unstable is that?”
Rowan meets her gaze.
“Because you’re holding it together by force.”
She feels it.
In the tight control wrapped around her instincts.
In the way hunger hasn’t gone away, only settled.
In the way everything inside her feels like it’s waiting for one wrong moment to snap.
Still—
She lifts her chin slightly.
“I’m still holding it.”
A beat passes.
Then, quieter—
“That counts.”
Rowan watches her for a second longer.
Then nods once.
It’s small.
But it matters.
“Yeah,” he says. “It does.”
The tension in the room shifts.
Not gone.
But different.
Seina exhales slowly, then turns away again, this time moving toward the window without stopping herself. The curtain still hangs half open, the last trace of dawn fading into full morning beyond the glass. The world outside looks normal.
It isn’t.
She presses her fingers lightly to the blood gem at her throat.
Cool.
Steady.
There.
A solution she didn’t choose.
A rule she’s expected to follow.
She stares out at the light for a long second, then says, more quietly than before—
“I didn’t think about him.”
Rowan doesn’t respond immediately.
Seina keeps looking out the window.
“My dad,” she clarifies, like she needs to say it out loud to make it real. “Not once. Not when I woke up. Not when I—” She swallows, the motion automatic even now. “Not when I realized what I was.”
That silence again.
Heavier this time.
“I should’ve,” she says. “That should’ve been the first thing I thought about.”
But it wasn’t.
Hunger was.
Survival was.
Everything new and sharp and wrong took up all the space.
The realization settles deep.
Not guilt.
Something colder.
Fear.
“What does that say about me,” she asks.
The question isn’t directed at him.
Not really.
But Rowan answers anyway.
“It says you were turned.”
Simple.
Uncomplicated.
And somehow not enough.
Seina shakes her head slightly.
“No,” she says. “It says something changed.”
Her fingers tighten against the gem.
The pull in her chest—if she can still call it that—flares faintly again, drawing her awareness back to where Rowan stands behind her. She hates that she notices it now. Hates that it’s there at all.
turns just enough to look at him over her shoulder.
“And I don’t know how much of me is still mine.”
Even Rowan doesn’t have an immediate answer for that.
The silence stretches.
Not empty.
Full.
And for the first time since she woke—
Seina feels something that has nothing to do with hunger, or instinct, or survival.
She feels loss.
Real.
Human.
And terrifying in a way the rest of this hasn’t been.
Because it means something inside her is still capable of it.
Which means it hasn’t all been taken.
Yet.
The thought lingers long after the words leave her, settling into the quiet of the room in a way that makes everything feel thinner around the edges. Rowan doesn’t try to answer it again. Maybe because he can’t. Maybe because this is one of those truths too large to fix with the right sentence.
Seina is grateful for that.
Not because she wants silence.
Because she wants something she can hold.
And right now, silence feels more honest than comfort.
She lets her hand fall from the blood gem and turns away from the window, the room coming back into focus piece by piece—the bed still unmade behind her, the dark cup on the table, Rowan standing too still near the door like he hasn’t decided whether giving her space is kind or dangerous.
Then the anger comes back.
Not all at once.
Not sharp enough to burn.
Just enough to keep her upright.
“Is my dad even going to know where I am?”
Rowan’s expression shifts by the smallest degree.
“He knows you’re safe.”
Seina stares at him.
That is not the same thing.
They both know it.
“You told him that?” she asks.
Rowan nods once.
“And Faylan?”
That one hangs longer.
“No.”
Of course not.
Because Faylan is gone.
Because everything keeps moving in circles around her sister’s absence no matter how much Seina wants to keep the focus on herself for one more second.
Her throat tightens.
Not from tears.
From purpose.
It comes back slowly, but once it does, it settles differently than the hunger did. Cleaner. Colder. More hers.
“I was trying to find her before,” Seina says quietly. “Before all of this.”
Rowan doesn’t interrupt.
“I remember that,” he says.
She looks at him then, properly, and there’s something steadying in the fact that he says it like he understands this matters. Not as a distraction. Not as something sentimental. As fact.
“My dad matters,” she says. “Faylan matters. I’m not staying in this room forever while everyone else decides what happens next.”
The words don’t come out loud.
They come out certain.
And Rowan, to his credit, doesn’t tell her no.
Not this time.
He watches her for a long second, reading whatever’s changed in her face, then says, “Then get stronger first.”
It isn’t permission.
It isn’t refusal either.
Seina lets out a slow breath and nods once.
That, at least, she can work with.
Rowan doesn’t give her time to sit with it.
“Then we start now.”
The shift is immediate. The air in the room changes with it, the quiet weight of emotion from a moment ago replaced by something sharper, more focused. Seina straightens slightly without meaning to, her body reacting before her mind fully catches up.
“Start what,” she asks, even though she already knows.
“Control.”
Rowan steps closer—not too close, but enough that she feels it again. That subtle, unwanted awareness pulling her attention toward him, threading through her senses like something alive. It’s quieter than before, but now that she’s noticed it, she can’t ignore it.
She doesn’t move away this time.
She waits.
Rowan studies her for a second, then deliberately shifts his position—just enough that he’s closer than necessary.
Too close.
Seina feels it instantly.
The change in proximity sharpens everything. His scent. The quiet, steady rhythm of blood beneath his skin. The pull—stronger now, more defined, pressing at her instincts in a way that makes her stomach tighten.
Her teeth ache.
“Don’t react,” Rowan says calmly.
Seina lets out a short, disbelieving breath. “That’s your advice?”
“It’s the only one that matters right now.”
The hunger stirs again.
Not violently like before, but enough. Enough to remind her how thin the line is. Enough to make her aware of exactly how close she is to something she doesn’t trust herself with yet.
She clenches her jaw.
“Step closer,” Rowan says.
Seina’s eyes snap to his.
“You’re kidding.”
“I’m not.”
For a second, she considers refusing. Not out of fear—out of irritation, out of stubbornness, out of the simple fact that she doesn’t like being told what to do, especially not like this.
Then she steps forward anyway.
The reaction is immediate.
The hunger spikes—not uncontrollable, but sharper, more focused. Her senses narrow in on him without permission, the awareness of his blood becoming louder, closer, more present. The pull between them tightens too, threading through her instincts in a way that makes it harder to tell where one feeling ends and the other begins.
Her breathing picks up out of habit.
Her hands curl slightly at her sides.
Rowan doesn’t move.
“Hold it,” he says.
Seina swallows hard. “I am.”
“Not enough.”
Her head lifts sharply. “I’m not attacking you, what do you want from me?”
“I want you to not want to.”
Seina stares at him, something flickering across her face that has nothing to do with hunger and everything to do with the impossible standard he just set.
“That’s not how this works,” she says.
“No,” Rowan agrees. “But it’s where you start.”
The frustration rises fast, sharp enough to cut through the rest of it.
“That’s not fair.”
“Neither is what you are now.”
The room goes quiet again.
Not soft.
Not calm.
Just still.
Seina exhales slowly, forcing her hands to relax, forcing her focus outward instead of inward. She looks at his face instead of his throat. His eyes instead of the pulse beneath his skin. She anchors herself to something that isn’t instinct, something that still belongs to her.
It takes effort.
More than she wants to admit.
But it works.
The hunger doesn’t disappear.
It settles.
Again.
Rowan notices immediately.
“That,” he says, quieter now. “That’s control.”
Seina lets out a breath, tension easing just slightly from her shoulders.
“That’s me not losing it for five seconds.”
“It’s the same thing.”
She almost argues.
Almost.
But she knows he’s right, and that’s somehow more irritating than if he wasn’t.
For a moment, neither of them moves.
Then Rowan tilts his head slightly, studying her in a way that feels different now. Less like he’s waiting for her to fail. More like he’s measuring something he didn’t expect.
“That should’ve been harder,” he says.
Seina frowns. “What.”
He doesn’t elaborate.
Of course he doesn’t.
She narrows her eyes slightly. “You keep saying things like that.”
“And you keep noticing them.”
“That’s because you’re being weirdly vague.”
Rowan almost smiles.
It’s brief. Gone as quickly as it appears.
“Get used to it.”
Seina huffs out a quiet breath, shaking her head slightly, but the edge in her frustration has dulled.
Just a little.
Because for the first time since she woke, she didn’t lose control, and that matters more than she wants it to. It doesn’t make her feel better. It doesn’t make any of this easier. But it gives the night a shape it didn’t have before, something sharper than panic and cleaner than grief.
For a while after that, neither of them says much.
Rowan steps back first, putting enough space between them that the pressure in the room eases without disappearing. Seina feels that too. That strange, quiet answer in her body loosens by degrees, becoming less immediate the farther he gets, and now that she’s noticed the pattern she hates it even more. Not because it frightens her. Because it feels like something she should have been warned about before it started happening.
She sits back down on the edge of the bed, more out of mental exhaustion than any physical need, and lets her hands rest in her lap. The blood gem presses coolly at the base of her throat. The room has gone darker around the edges now, the weak light from outside shifting as morning fully settles in.
Rowan doesn’t leave.
He moves to the side table instead, lifts the empty cup, checks it, sets it back down. Practical motion. Deliberate. The kind of thing people do when they need to keep their hands occupied so the room doesn’t notice what they’re thinking.
Seina watches him for a second.
Then looks away.
She’s tired of this room. Tired of being observed inside it. Tired of every silence feeling like it belongs more to what she’s become than to who she used to be. Her gaze drifts back toward the window, toward the pale line of morning behind the curtains, and then farther than that, to the world beyond it.
Home.
The thought arrives quietly this time, not with panic, not with shame.
Just fact.
Her dad will wake up and look for her voice in the house. He’ll expect doors opening, footsteps on the stairs, one of them saying something half-awake and sarcastic from the kitchen. He’ll expect the old shape of things and instead get absence. Maybe Rowan told him enough to keep him from falling apart. Maybe he didn’t. Maybe “she’s safe” is the only mercy anyone thought to offer him.
And Faylan—
Faylan is still gone.
Still wherever she ran to, whatever danger she chose, whatever answers she thought she was strong enough to drag back with her. Seina can picture her too easily—jaw set, eyes bright with that awful stubborn certainty she gets when fear turns into direction. Moving too fast. Not asking for help. Trying to carry everything herself because somewhere along the line she decided that was easier than watching anyone else fail her.
Something in Seina’s face tightens.
Everyone keeps talking about what she is now, what she needs now, what rules she has to follow now.
No one has said Faylan’s name in several minutes.
No one has said Daniel’s either.
And suddenly the room feels even smaller for it.
She looks down at the gem resting against her throat and touches it once, lightly. Stolen protection. Borrowed rules. A practical answer to a problem she never asked to have. It should make her feel safer. Instead it only reminds her how much of her life has already been rearranged around other people’s decisions.
“Everyone has a plan for me.”
The words leave her before she means to say them aloud.
Rowan looks up from where he stands by the table.
Seina keeps staring at the gem.
“You do. Emerson does. The wolves probably do. Every House apparently does.” She lets out a thin breath that almost sounds like a laugh and doesn’t mean to. “It’s impressive, actually. I’ve been awake for, what, a few hours?”
There’s no real bitterness in it at first.
That comes in on the last sentence.
Rowan doesn’t interrupt. That’s probably wise.
She lifts her eyes to him at last.
“But none of that changes the fact that my dad is out there thinking I’m gone, and my sister is actually gone, and I’m in here learning how not to bite people.”
The sentence hangs there.
Too sharp to soften afterward.
For one moment, Rowan says nothing at all. Then he leans one shoulder lightly against the wall beside the table and studies her with that same unreadable calm that is starting to feel less like distance and more like effort.
“You’re not wrong.”
That answer catches her off guard enough that she goes still.
She had expected deflection. Caution. Something about survival first and feelings later and all the practical cruelty this new world seems to run on. Instead he just gives her the truth.
No argument.
No correction.
That makes the next words easier.
“I’m not staying like this forever,” she says quietly.
Not this room.
Not this waiting.
Not this version of herself where everyone else moves and decides and protects while she stands in the middle of it like a problem too dangerous to leave unattended.
Her voice doesn’t rise.
It doesn’t need to.
Rowan hears the shape of it anyway.
“What do you mean.”
Seina looks toward the window again. The wild presence from outside is gone now, or farther off, but the echo of it remains—Kael leaving, but not leaving town. The promise in that. The option in it. Beyond that is Greythorne. Her father. The shop. Every unfinished thing. And somewhere in all of it, Faylan.
“I mean this isn’t enough,” she says. “Not for me.”
The blood gem cools beneath her fingers as she lowers her hand.
“I’ll learn control. I’ll do whatever I have to do so I don’t become a danger to everyone I care about.” Her jaw tightens slightly. “But after that, I’m not sitting here while everyone else keeps moving.”
That lands differently than the rest of the conversation had.
Rowan straightens.
Not because he’s startled.
Because he recognizes something in her tone he can’t dismiss.
Purpose.
Not panic.
Not hunger.
Purpose.
His gaze stays on her for a long moment, reading whatever has shifted in her face, and Seina lets him. She doesn’t look away. She doesn’t soften the words by pretending they were only frustration.
For the first time since she woke up, the future doesn’t feel like an empty black space filled only with survival.
It has direction.
Faint.
Unsteady.
But real.
And it leads, inevitably, to Faylan.
Rowan says nothing for so long that she almost thinks he won’t answer at all. Then, finally, he gives the smallest nod.
“One thing at a time.”
That would have annoyed her an hour ago.
Now it only sounds temporary.
Good, she thinks. It should.
Because one thing at a time still means movement.
Still means there is an after.
Seina leans back slightly and lets her gaze drift once more toward the pale morning at the edge of the curtains. Her father’s face rises in her mind again, then Faylan’s, then the memory of herself before any of this—warm, human, ordinary in ways she didn’t know to treasure while they were still easy.
She doesn’t know how much of that girl is left.
She doesn’t know what finding Faylan will look like anymore, or what Faylan will see when she looks back at her.
But the thought of doing nothing feels worse than fear.
By the time the room goes quiet again, it no longer feels like the same silence that followed her waking. It’s still heavy. Still full of wrongness and change and everything she hasn’t learned yet.
But underneath it, something else has settled.
Not peace.
Decision.
And for the first time since she opened her eyes into deathless stillness, Seina knows exactly what the next shape of her life needs to be.
She’s going to find her sister.