~CASSIAN's POV~
The thing about federal facilities that nobody told you was how loud the silence was.
Cassian Vaughn had been a man of managed environments his entire adult life. Controlled offices, chosen restaurants, the penthouse in Lekki that he had designed himself down to the light fixtures. Silence in those spaces had been a tool, something he deployed, something he inhabited by choice. Here, the silence was imposed. It had a texture, an authority, a specific quality of being not-chosen that he found considerably harder to manage than he had anticipated.
He sat in his allotted visiting room hour and thought about his daughter's voice on the phone.
You're further along than I thought.
He had meant it as acknowledgment. He had always known Elara would be good, he had made her goo
