The week following the garden confrontation between Aria and Selene passed with the particular tension of a household holding its breath. I had heard about the exchange secondhand, through Nessa's careful report to one of my guards rather than from Aria herself, and I had spent several days turning over the best way to address it without making her feel managed rather than heard.
Voss found me in the war room later that week, and I knew from the set of his shoulders that whatever he had come to say, he had been rehearsing it the whole walk there.
"My daughter is not handling this well," he said, without preamble.
"I am aware."
"Are you." He crossed his arms, and for the first time in eleven years of working beside him, I saw something closer to a father's grief than a Beta's political
