POV: Liam
I sat with the photograph for a long time. Everyone else in the room was talking. I could hear the conversation happening around me, Isla pulling up everything the Thornline had on the Hollow Court’s recent movements, Maren answering questions in her measured unhurried way, Jake asking the practical questions that nobody else was thinking to ask because they were too deep in supernatural politics to remember the logistical basics.
I sat at the kitchen table and looked at Cole Ashwood’s face in the photograph and thought about eleven days.
That was the number I had carried since I was nine years old. Not the image of it, not the sounds, though both of those lived in me with the particular permanence of things witnessed before you had the architecture to process them. Mostly the
