Roxie's POV
I had not cried since I crossed into rogue land in a torn white dress.
Not when Marcus betrayed me. Not when my father banished me. Not when the witch hunters came, not when Vespera died, not even when I held my newborn nephew in a dirt cellar with the whole world coming apart above us. I had locked the crying away somewhere I could not reach, because every time I had wept as a child no one had come, and a person learns not to spend on things that have no return.
Then my father lifted his ruined arm, and his blind white eyes turned toward the sound of my breathing, and he smiled at me like nothing in the world had been taken from him at all.
And I broke.
I crossed the floodlit courtyard and I fell against his chest and I *sobbed*. Ugly, gasping, shaking sobs, the kind I d
