They found him waiting in the old manor house itself, seated calmly in a dust-covered study that mirrored, with unsettling precision, the same kind of isolated grandeur Kane's own father favored, and Wren understood immediately, watching his composed, unhurried demeanor, that he'd known of their approach long before they'd ever cleared the property's overgrown gardens.
"Sister," Alaric said, rising from his chair as Maren stepped into the room behind the rest of their party, his weathered face carrying an expression of genuine, complicated emotion that Wren hadn't expected from a man she'd been told to consider a calculating villain. "It's been considerably too long."
"Thirty years," Maren said, voice carrying a fury and grief so tightly wound together that Wren couldn't determine which
