Nobody spoke much on the drive over. Mika kept turning Elena's words over in her head — twenty-three years of patience, somebody's plan finally coming due — and every version of it made her stomach turn a little more.
Yara's house looked different in daylight — smaller, almost fragile, the wards worked into the timber barely visible without the dark to make them glow. She was waiting at the same kitchen table as before, like she'd known they were coming before they did.
"Elena," Yara said, not quite surprised, not quite calm either. "It's been a long time."
"Not long enough, apparently," Elena said, taking a seat without being asked. "Tell them what you told me thirty years ago, when I came to you with my own fragment."
Yara's expression didn't change, but something in her posture did
