There was no more time for anything except the work.
That sentence had been true every night since I was nine, but it had never been true in this exact way. Before, work meant floors. Scrub the ash stone until your knees bled. Survive until morning.
Now work meant sitting in the Vael Palace library at twenty past midnight with two babies asleep upstairs whose eyes had turned gold for one breath, and whose gold meant something the grandmother's notes described in a way that made my own blood go cold.
Jasper had kept his word. Tea, gone cold, two cups. The grandmother's journals stacked in the order I'd left them. Dessa's copied notes on top. And beside them, his own handwriting bullet points, margins filled with the small, precise script he used when he was trying not to be afraid.
He
