I stared at him. At the sharp lines of his face, the human weariness in his eyes.
“Does that mean…” I hesitated, doing the maths in my head. “Does that mean you’re thousands of years old?”
A trace of something dry touched his mouth. “No. I believe I was born thirty-three years ago. Which makes me… an anomaly. A ghost of something that should be dead.”
My heart thudded against my ribs. The truth about Eamon rose in my throat, desperate for air, but I swallowed it down.
Riven served the very institution that had forced my parents into the shadows. Eamon had begged me to drop the Calysteriinvestigation, terrified of exactly this—of Highspire turning its gaze our way.
If the murders, my parents, and Riven were all strands of the same knot, pulling it tight might strangle us all.
I could risk myself. I could trade my own secrets for Riven’s knowledge because I needed to understand the monster in the mirror. But Eamon? No. I refused to paint a target on his back before I even understood the war we were fighting. I looked down at the books. My hand drifted to a slim volume near his elbow. I slid it towards me. My fingers trembled with the collision of thoughts racing in my mind as I opened it to the title page.
The Echoes of Shattered Dawnby Arin Brightleaf.
I recognised it instantly. This was the book Riven had pocketed at the City Archives, the one he had refused to show me while he played the part of the untouchable consultant.
“Selene?” Riven’s voice was sharp.
I looked up, the air in my lungs suddenly thin. “Arin Brightleaf,” I whispered, shaking my head. “This is my mother’s book.”
The secret was out, raw and irreversible.
Riven went completely still. He held his breath, eyes fixed and unmoving. He watched me, his face draining of what little colour had returned to it. His shadows, usually so controlled, gave a violent shimmer against the wall, betraying the shock he refused to voice.
“Your mother,” he repeated, the words weighted.
“She wrote this. This is her pen name.” I touched the page, panic tightening my chest. I had crossed a line I couldn’t retreat from; I had to use the opening to my advantage. I hardened my voice into an accusation.
“You took from the Archives… you knew exactly what you were looking for. You stole my mother’s work.”
Riven’s eyes widened. It was the first time I had ever seen him look truly caught off guard. The silence stretched between us, heavy with dust and secrets.
I could see the gears turning behind his eyes—connecting dates,connecting names, realising that the woman he had been training, the woman he had been binding himself to, was the daughter of the very mystery he had been chasing.
“I didn’t know,” he said softly. And for once, I believed him.
He reached for the book, then stopped short. His hand rested on the table, inches from mine. The sunlight gleamed off the pale skin of his knuckles.
“If she wrote these,” he said, “then she knew about the extractions. Selene… she knew what they were doing in Highspire before anyone else did.”
“And now I’m in the middle of it,” I murmured.
The weight of his gaze was intense, almost unbearable. The air between us hummed—that familiar, electric tension that had nothing to do with the books and everything to do with the way he was looking at my mouth.
He cleared his throat, pulling his hand back. The moment shattered, but the shards were still sharp.
“Look here.” He reached over, flipping the book open to the last page, and tapped a symbol. “Focus on this.”
I turned the book over, my fingers brushing the worn paper. There, sketched in a hurried, familiar hand—my mother’s hand—was an intricate geometric design. A dark, upturned arc held a central core of jagged lines that resembled a weapon forged of light. Vertical rays pierced the curve of the arc, interlocking to form a single, reinforced seal.
There were no names written beside the symbols, only a few fragmented notes in the margins that had been crossed out and rewritten, as if she were struggling to translate a dead language.
My gaze dropped to the bottom of the sketch, where a formal title had once been written. The ink here was a mess of charcoal-dark smudges, as if she had tried to erase it or time had simply worn the truth away. Only the first few words remained legible.
TheSeal of…
The rest was a rough blur of grey, leaving the true nature of the union out of reach.
