Rain battered the roof of the car like a restless hand.
By the time I reached Highspire, it was close to midnight. The towers cut long, blue-black lines through the storm, glowing with the sheer arrogance of a place that believed it could legislate the weather.
I should have gone straight inside. Instead, I sat for a moment in the underground parking lot, the engine ticking as it cooled, my shirt still damp against my skin.
Her scent lingered on my hands. Her magic… on my mind. I needed to stay focused, to steady my pulse, so I turned my thoughts to the books.
Selene’s voice, quiet but certain, echoed in the small space of the car. “My mum wrote this one… She died when I was young.”
And in her flat—while the water ran behind the bathroom door—I had reached for the cloth-wrapped volume.The Tides Beyond the Veil. Liora Rowan’s work.
I should have recognised the name immediately. I had spent years hunting her texts—copied editions smuggled from old archives, fragments from abandoned libraries. But I’d never seen this edition. Itwas wrapped like a keepsake, her daughter’s fingerprints worn into the spine.
Liora Rowan. The woman who saw the end coming.
And the other book…The Little Sun and the Little Moon.
A children’s tale. A bedtime story. But the bones of it—the structure, the tempo of the myth—were unmistakable.
I knew that story. The real tale, stripped of the smiling suns and blushing moons found in human nurseries. The one about a world breaking in half. The one about a separation so violent it tore the sky apart.
The memory belonged to a different life, buried under layers of scar tissue.
And yet, there it sat in her flat, disguised as a fairy tale.
It changed everything.
Selene remained completely unaware of who she was. She lacked the context to understand what those books meant, or what her mother had hidden in plain sight. She was walking blind through a minefield.
I had fed her a fraction of the truth in the kitchen, keeping the rest locked down. I needed to cross-reference her coverless book with my own archives before surrendering the full picture. Her magic was still violently tethered to her emotions. Dropping the absolute truth on her without a strategy would only light the fuse.
She was Liora’s daughter. The variables had changed. The timeline had accelerated.
If Korenth saw what I had just seen—if he connected the stray detective to the ghosts he was afraid of—he would unmake her. He would strap her to a table and tear the answers out of her blood.
I could no longer operate on the periphery. I had to intercept the blow before it landed.
I shoved the car door open and stepped into the subterranean garage. The biting air of the underground level hit my damp clothes instantly, a welcome shock to my system. Concrete echoed under my boots as I crossed to the private lift.
Inside, the flat felt colder than the storm. Or perhaps I was simply aware of it now—the emptiness, the silence. Too much space. Too much order.
I toed off my boots and unbuttoned my wet shirt, letting it fall to the floor with a dull, sodden sound.
The memory shifted to the silence after the water stopped. I had looked up from the books to find her simply standing there, steam following her like a cloak. Her magic bloomed warm and soft around her—a steady weight that reached across the room and touched me without permission.
I dragged a hand down my face, my jaw tight.
She was dangerous beyond her power; she was dangerous because of what she was doing to me.
I got into my own shower and slammed the water to cold.
It hit hard, biting down my spine, dragging the heat out of my head. It did nothing to drown the memory. It only made it sharper.
I braced my hands against the tiles, water streaming over my shoulders, but I was back in her kitchen.
The image of her flooded my mind—water beading down the long, elegant line of her neck. The towel had done little to hide the truth of her. It clung to the full swell of her breasts and the lush, dangerous curve of her hips, outlining a body that was undeniably, devastatingly real.
She was tall—statuesque—taking up space in a way that thinned the air. And that hair… a river of dark copper, weighed down by water, falling all the way to her waist against pale skin.
