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I don’t know what to say. I don’t even know who these people are, other than that they were named in that newspaper clipping Damaris found. The Marrow family was mentioned. I just never knew Sola had become one of them.
“Right.” He scoffs, eyes blazing with a look that hurts worse than any gun could. It isn’t quite anger, but something far more dangerous, betrayal burning behind his expression like everything between us is cracking apart right in front of him.
“Rowan.” Sola reaches me before I can figure out what to do and pulls me into her arms. Her voice breaks against my hair. “I was so worried about you.”
“I missed you,” I whisper. My heart hurts as tears burn behind my eyes. I won’t cry in front of all these people, but still… I can only half-believe she’s actually here.
After a second, she pulls back just enough to look at me properly, her hands still gripping my shoulders while her gaze moves over my face like she’s trying to make up for years all at once. “Look at you. So handsome. So grown up.”
“Where did you go?”
She opens her mouth, but she is shoved aside by a guard who marches by before she can speak. Instead, she says, “Listen, there’s no time now, but I’ll tell you soon. Now, you need to come with me. We need to get you somewhere safe.”
“The Virels—”
“Not from the Virels,” she rushes out. “Though they are trouble as well.”
“Secure the exits!” Angela’s voice sounds different now. “They knew the sequence.”
Sola and I both look up to where Ciaran’s mother stands, leaning on her cane, eyes glaring into the void. “Whatever you’ve come for, Rowan stays in our custody.”
“Absolutely not.” For the first time, genuine fear flashes across Sola’s face. “Cassian, get my brother somewhere safe. My husband,” she adds to me as a dark-haired man appears beside her.
Husband? Since when do you have a husband?
I want to ask, but there’s no time. Chaos is spreading, amongst the guests mostly, and then someone closes an arm around me and starts pushing me toward the door. I don’t even know what to think, aside from the fact that the hurt hits so hard I almost forget how to breathe.
“Don’t touch him.” Ciaran barges through the crowd, pushing a guard aside who steps directly into his path.
Lucan follows him. “Ciaran—”
“No. Fucking damn it! They won’t take him.”
The entire pavilion fractures around me. Shouting and movement and the sound of the Noctis collapse together so completely that I can barely tell where any of it is coming from. Less than a minute ago, this was a private concert. Now it feels like a battlefield, and I don’t even know who started the war.
Sola is standing here, alive after all these years, while guards close in around the stage and people keep moving and watching and reaching for me.
Something inside me gives way.
I’m tired of fighting. Tired of defending my emotions. Tired of wondering who I can trust.
All the panic and confusion and relief and anger combine so fast that I barely even realize I’m tearing my arm free from the guard before I stumble backward. My breathing collapses into sharp uneven gasps, and the medical band on my wrist flashes red.
For one impossible second, all I can see is him—dark hair, dark eyes, beautiful in a dangerous way—cutting through the crowd like nothing in this room is going to stop him from reaching me.
“Rowan!”
Then three Marrow guards close the distance between us, cutting him off, and more bodies surge into the space separating the stage from the front rows.
Sola is alive. And Ciaran is looking at me like he doesn’t know who I am.
Shouting erupts across the pavilion. Guards push through the crowd, people start screaming, and my pulse climbs higher with every passing second, each beat landing hard enough to hurt.
None of this makes sense.
You disappeared. You came back. And somehow, everyone knows who you are except me.
The red light keeps flashing as my breathing gets worse.
