The quiet settles around us — the penthouse holding the last of the afternoon light, the bay doing its slow silver thing below. The future sitting open somewhere just ahead of us.
She reaches over, without looking, and finds my hand.
I close my fingers around hers. Hard, once. Then easy.
32 - Wren
The sound reaches us before the door does — voices, laughter, the clink of glasses, and underneath all of it the smell of frying garlic and onions, the warmth of a kitchen that’s been working for hours. Logan’s hand is at my lower back as we cross the main floor of La Sirena, dark and closed tonight, chairs down but the stage unlit.
The door to the private dining room is half-open.
I stop just before it.
My nerves surface without asking — the quiet kind that have nothing to do with fear and everything to do with wanting something to go right. Isa will be there. Isa has been cold to me since the beginning, and nothing I've done in weeks has moved that needle. I've been Logan's arrangement, then Logan's guest, then Logan's whatever-this-is, and Isa has looked through all of it with those dark eyes and given me nothing.
He notices. Of course he does. He turns and looks at me, not with patience exactly, more like a man who has already done his accounting and reached a conclusion.
"She'll be there," I say.
"Yes."
"And she'll still be cold."
He looks at me for a moment. Something moves in his face — not reassurance, which would be wrong, but recognition. A woman who has earned her way into a room that doesn't open easily, and he knows what that costs. "Possibly." His hand presses at my back. "Come on."
We step through together, his hand warm and certain.
The room is long, low-lit, candled. A table running most of its length, mismatched chairs that have accumulated over years of no one caring about the chairs. Sera has covered every inch of the surface with food, platters and bowls and serving dishes stacked everywhere. It makes my chest ache a little, the way generosity sometimes does when you've been a long time without it.
Gabriel sees us first. He rises and crosses the room, unhurried, already moving before anyone else has registered us.
He stops in front of me. Not past me to Logan. In front of me.
"Wren," he says. "I'm glad you stayed."
He means all of it — stayed in Miami, stayed after the Gilded Lily, stayed yesterday morning when I could have been on a bus. He says it like he’s offering absolution.
"Thank you," I say.
He nods once. Then he turns to Logan, and something passes between them — a hand on the shoulder, words exchanged too quietly to catch. Gabriel returns to his seat.
Logan leans down toward my ear. "He's not generous with praise."
"I know."
"You earned it." A pause. "So did I, apparently. You've made me insufferably sentimental."
I look at the room.
Sera is at the far end, moving between the kitchen door and the table with one more dish. Gabriel has resumed his seat beside her, his hand finding her hip as she passes — brief, possessive, the touch of a man who still can't quite believe he gets to.. Marisol is halfway through something she's explaining to Nico with both hands; he listens with his elbow on the table, watching her with an expression he would deny to anyone whonamed it. The sparkling water in front of her is going flat. She doesn't notice.
Adrian is at the table's head, pouring wine for anyone within reach. The Siren sits near the middle, hands folded in her lap, eyes slightly distant. Juliet is beside her, turned inward, plate untouched.
Gunner is facing the exit, watching the door as he always does. And Isa is standing at the side table sorting through bottles of wine. She doesn’t look up when we enter.
I take the seat Logan holds out and sit down.
Sera stops beside me on her way back from the kitchen.
