Marisol was gone.
Not fleeing in a panic, not caught mid-flight with a bag half packed and a guilty look on her face.
Gone the way a woman goes when she's spent years preparing for exactly this possibility, methodically, without haste, leaving behind a room so carefully emptied that it took the search party the better part of an hour to confirm she'd actually lived there at all.
I stood in the doorway of her quarters while Rhys's warriors worked through it, and felt a cold, familiar dread settle into my chest. This wasn't the reaction of someone caught off guard.
This was the reaction of someone who'd built an exit into every version of her plan from the very beginning, someone for whom exposure had never been a possibility she hadn't already prepared for.
"She knew," Idris said, lo
