Damon noticed at dessert.
Not her absence specifically, not at first. It was subtler than that. It was the way a room feels when something that was present in it is no longer present, a shift in air pressure so small that most people would not register it as anything other than a vague sense that something was different. Most people were not Damon Vael.
He picked up his dessert fork and did not look around and did not change his expression and filed the information away behind everything else his face was doing, which was very little, because his face rarely did very much at formal dinners.
Theo was two seats to his left. Damon did not look at him. He moved two fingers on the tablecloth in the direction of the doorway, a signal so old and small between them that it required no translati
