The sound cracked like a gunshot in the small room.
“He wrote in this two days ago,” I said, my voice shaking. “After the station. Before the lab. He wrote a letter to me, Riven. He dated it.”
I leaned in, bracing my hands on the table.
“You gave this to me. Which means you were there. You went to his house.”
“Yes,” Riven said. His voice was a rough whisper.
“Why?”
“At Duskfall Manor,” he said, his voice quiet but steady. “When you told me Arin Brightleaf was your mother’s pen name. I recognised the name immediately. The text I pulled from the library regarding Silverite was published over three hundred years ago. For your mother to be the author, she had to be Aetherkind. She had to be one of them.”
His jaw tightened, his gaze dropping to the floor.
“It changed all the variables. It meant the stories she wrote were actual recorded histories of a civilisation that truly existed, disguised as folklore. I had spent years hunting those exact truths. When the pieces locked together, I required undeniable confirmation. I went to your father to ask about her. I needed to understand your bloodline. And I needed to understand the connection I feel every time I stand near you.”
He met my gaze, drawing his shoulders taut against the cuffs secured behind his back.
“I thought he would fight me. Instead, he told me the truth. He told me things he kept hidden even from you.”
“What things?”
Riven looked up, his blue eyes searching mine.
“He told me he knew what I was. He said he had sensed me since the last time you visited him. He told me your magic settled when I was near—that my shadows gave your light a place to rest. He said you looked whole.”
Heat rose in my cheeks, a mix of memory and grief. Eamon had felt the healing. He had felt the connection.
“He told me seeing us at the station was just the confirmation,” Riven continued softly. “He said I was the Second Soul. The one who woke your Spark all those decades ago.”
I stared at him. The pieces clicked into place with terrifying precision.
The journal entries from over two decades ago… We had been tied together by that same moment of disaster for our entire lives.
A dozen questions clawed at my throat. What exactly ruptured? What was he doing twenty-three years ago that broke my life before it even started? But I swallowed the questions down. The mechanics of a two-decade-old disaster didn’t matter right now. Eamon did.
“So you talked,” I said, my voice tight. “You shared secrets. And then what? You just left him there?”
“I went to warn him,” Riven said, urgency bleeding into his tone. “I told him what Varessia is. I told him that after the station, she would never stop hunting him. She believed he was the source of the surge she felt in the Old Quarter.”
He closed his eyes for a second.
“I told him to run. I told him to pack a bag and leave the city before she sent a retrieval team.”
“Why didn’t he?”
“Because he was tired, Selene. And he saw the tactical reality before I did.”
Riven leaned forward as much as the cuffs allowed, his voice dropping to a hush.
“He knew the walls he’d spent twenty years building to hide you were finally failing.” Riven swallowed hard. “He told me that if he ran, they would just tear the city apart looking for you. Giving himself up was the only way to end the hunt.”
A sob caught in my throat. He chose it. He chose to be the bait.
“I tried to argue,” Riven said, his voice cracking. “But my phone buzzed. The summons from Highspire. I had to go, or my cover was blown.”
“And Eamon?”
