The first hint didn’t come from gossip.
It came from a scar.
Aria noticed it one afternoon in the storage room. She and Lena were knee‑deep in sacks of grain and crates of dried herbs when Rowan stepped in to grab a folder from the top shelf.
He stretched up, shirt pulling tight. For a heartbeat the hem rode high enough for her to see a thin, pale line angling along his side and disappearing under his ribs. Old, deep, too clean to be an animal swipe.
“Look at that,” Lena said without glancing up from her list. “The legendary ‘I was young and stupid’ mark makes an appearance.”
Rowan tugged his shirt back down. “It was not stupidity. It was a tactical miscalculation.”
“You walked into an ambush alone because you didn’t trust anyone to watch your back,” Lena said. “That’s the definition
