Seraphine's POV
Before dawn the air in the suite always felt cooler than the corridor. The stone floor still held the night’s chill, embers winked in the hearth, and the corners of the maps rustled softly in the draft between the windows. Darius didn’t ask me to wait outside; with a single gesture he called me in. When I closed the door, silence settled over us like a fitted coat.
“Sit,” he said, pointing not to the armchair but to the low couch in the antechamber. “We speak alone. What I’ll say concerns no one else. We leave for two weeks. Half of it is travel; the other half is a test—yours and mine.”
His voice was dry and factual, but full of a focused attention that didn’t let anything slip away unanswered. I sat. The cold iron ring on my wrist touched the linen beneath me, a quiet
