Lucian’s POV
My father looks older.
This is the first thing I notice and I notice it without sympathy, just observation, the way you observe something you have been bracing for and find slightly different from what you prepared yourself to see. He is heavier around the jaw and there is more grey in his hair than fourteen months ago and he is standing at the bottom of my front steps with two sentinels behind him and the particular posture of a man who has decided he is owed something and has come to collect it.
He looks at me the way he has always looked at me.
Like I am a project he has not finished yet.
“You look tired,” he says.
“You are not welcome here,” I say.
He does not flinch. He never flinches. That was one of the first things he taught me, or tried to, that flinching is th
