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I hate this. I hate him sitting that far away from me.

Somehow, the silence feels worse than if he were angry. I hate how badly I want him beside me as the pavilion keeps growing louder and stranger.

Usually one look from Ciaran is enough to steady me whenever the panic starts climbing too high. But tonight, he only watches me from across the room like he already knows something I don’t, and the longer that silence stretches between us, the harder it becomes to trust my own footing.

I finish the progression Halvern assigned for tonight and let the final note fade before lowering the bow, silence lingering beneath the glass dome while the forest watches from beyond the lights before applause finally begins.

Then Angela Virel lifts one elegant hand, and the entire room stills. “Play that again.”

I blink toward her from the instrument. “Which part, ma’am?”

“The opening progression.”

Confusion pulls through me. “The piece I just played?”

“No.” Her gaze never leaves the Noctis. “The notes from before the performance started.”

“The warm-up?”

“No.” She curls her fingers around the silver cane resting beside her chair. “The other one.”

I try the progression Halvern made me repeat earlier that afternoon, letting the notes move carefully beneath my hands while the pavilion stays silent around me.

Angela Virel shakes her head. “Not that.”

Then understanding clicks into place as I realize she means the sequence I always play without thinking whenever my hands start shaking too badly before performances. It’s the same progression I’ve used for years, so familiar now that my hands find it before I decide to. Something about the repetition always eases my breathing whenever panic starts clawing too high beneath my ribs.

I play it again.

When the final note fades, Angela lowers her head slightly. “I haven’t heard those notes in a very long time.”

The sudden attention it draws sends a flicker of unease through me. Too many memories seem tangled up in those notes, and the way Angela says it makes me feel like she’s mourning something I don’t understand.

“It’s only a warm-up sequence,” I murmur, fingers hovering over the strings.

“Play it again.”

Something shifts around the pavilion. Conversations die completely as the strange intensity of everyone’s attention presses on the Noctis until the hairs rise along my arms.

This time, when my hands touch the instrument, the sound rising through the pavilion feels different. Maybe it’s because my head is still tangled up in old memories, but the notes seem older than they did a moment ago, heavy enough to drag the room into silence.

Angela Virel rises slowly to her feet, her mouth parting slightly as the final notes fade. Something fractures across her expression, relief and disbelief colliding so hard she looks almost frightened by whatever she’s just confirmed. “You⁠—”

Movement spreads through the entrance behind the audience. Guards along the pavilion walls straighten one after another, the kind of movement that makes an entire room realize someone important is arriving before anyone has actually seen them yet.

The massive glass doors at the far end of the hall open, and a sharp murmur moves through the pavilion. Several Virel guards shift position before anyone has even stepped through the entrance.

I look up, and the second I see who steps through the entrance, the breath leaves my lungs.

Sola steps into the pavilion wearing black silk and diamonds sharp enough to look dangerous, and for one impossible second all I can see is my sister finally standing alive in front of me after years of searching for her, even after everyone else gave up.

She looks exactly the same, yet nothing like the girl who left.

Older. Sharper. Draped in a life I know nothing about. But it’s her. It’s Sola.

Every dead end I ever chased rushes back at once. The photograph in the library. All the nights I told myself I’d built a ghost out of grief, that I wanted her back so badly I’d started seeing her in strangers’ faces. Everyone said people from the Ward don’t come back. That I should stop looking before it broke me.

I never stopped.