The east wing nursery had been sealed for as long as anyone in the household could remember its existence at all, its door left untouched even during the frantic, week-long scramble of renovations that had swept through the rest of the manor, because Kane himself had given the explicit order to leave it exactly as it was. It wasn't sealed now.
Wren reached the room close behind Elder Maren, both of them moving as quickly as the old woman's cane and Wren's still-racing heart would allow, and found Kane already standing at the threshold, his expression carved from something Wren had never once seen on his face before in the entire week she'd known him — not the familiar rage that had shattered his study window, not the careful, controlled fury he'd shown Vale across a dinner table, but a ki
