CANDICE.
Maya was gone.
Just like that. She had slipped away in the middle of everything, vanishing into the night while we were all distracted by Aldric standing at the gate like some ghost from my past. Six years. Six years of lies, six years of fake friendship, six years of her sitting across from me in quiet offices, bringing me coffee when I was exhausted, holding Leo when he was a tiny screaming newborn at two in the morning who wouldn’t settle no matter what I did. She had been the one person I let myself lean on completely. The one person I thought was truly mine in this messed-up world.
And she had been feeding every single detail to Hawthorne from the very beginning.
I stood in the briefing room with my hands clenched so tightly that my nails dug deep into my palms. The anger
