Makayla had almost allowed herself to believe that no war was being fought over her.
The days at Blackwood Estate had a gentleness to them that made it easy to forget the world outside the gates. She woke to the sound of birds, walked the garden in the morning, helped Eleanor in the kitchen, and slept each night — she admitted it to no one — counting the hours until Declan came home. She was beginning, dangerously, to feel safe. And that, of course, was exactly the moment the world reached in to tear that feeling out of her hands.
It began with a headline. Declan's face on the front page, and beside it a photograph of Makayla taken outside the coffee shop — head down, arms folded, looking like something small and frightened. The words beneath the pictures were a knife wrapped in silk: BL
