Harper
By the time evening slides over the trees and turns the sky that soft bruise-purple, my legs feel like boiled spaghetti and my patience is coming to an end. A week of Thorne’s “gentle encouragement” (read: getting pushed around by a walking mountain) has turned me into a walking bruise. I’m weirdly proud of not dying. I’m also at critical levels of “done.”
We’re finishing cooldowns at the training ground, when I feel it: the shift. Not in the wind this time. In the people. Conversations drop a register. Footsteps soften. Alec stops narrating, which is my first clue that something is genuinely wrong with the universe.
Then I see why.
Rowan is here.
At the edge of the field, half-shadowed by pines, arms folded like avow angry statue. He’s watching Thorne and me training with a v
