Wyatt extended his hand. “Nice to meet you.” Firm grip, brief, professional. But the warmth behind it wasn’t strategic. Just genuine.
“Mira.”
“I know who you are.” A half-smile. “Maxwell descendant. I’ll try not to make it weird.”
Thiago watched the exchange with an expression I couldn’t fully read. His gaze moved between us, the way a man looked at pieces on a board when the game was starting to take shape.
“Wyatt has been with the Order since he was seventeen,” Thiago said. “Recruited, trained, tested. Everything this organization demands of its people, he’s given.”
He turned to me. “But he chose this life. You were born into it.”
The distinction landed with intent. I had the right blood, the right surname, the right dead mother. Thiago’s hand settled on my shoulder.
“You’re a legacy, Mira.”
A pause.
“It’s time you learned what you were born to do.”
35
— • —
Percival
The cabin was cold.
Not the kind of cold that meant someone had stepped out for an hour. This was deep, settled, the kind that moved in when nobody planned on coming back. I stood in the doorway with my pack on the ground behind me and let the emptiness hit me in the chest.
Their scent was everywhere and nowhere.
She wasn’t here. None of us were. The cabin was a museum of a life that had lasted for a month and ended in an afternoon.
I closed the door behind me and headed toward town.
The bookshop sat on the quiet end of Ashvale’s main stretch. The windows were intact, the new paint still holding up, the signabove the door blank because she’d never named it. Solomon had finished the rebuild before the rejection. Every beam, every shelf, every exposed ceiling she’d asked for. A building with no one inside it.
I tried the door. Locked. Peered through the glass. Dark, clean, abandoned. The reading nook he’d framed out sat empty in the east wall. The coffee bar she’d designed for the front window had stools tucked neatly against the counter.
My jaw worked around the ache that had been living in my chest since Veyndral.
The bruise Solomon had put there was fading, finally, a greenish stain where the purple had been. I’d let it heal on its own. Partly because I deserved it. Partly because, in the most messed-up way possible, it was the last thing either of them had given me before I left.
Ashvale’s main street was quiet in the early afternoon.
I kept to the storefronts, hood up. A few people glanced my way without recognition. Good. The last thing I needed was the gossip mill firing up about one of the firefighters being back.
The hardware store. The diner. The post office where Mrs. Tenley sorted mail.
No sign of Mira anywhere.
“Percy?”
I stopped. Turned.
Cateline stood outside the grocery store. Her eyes went wide, then narrowed, cycling through surprise and calculation in about two seconds flat.
“You’re back.” She adjusted the bags. “Alone?”
