They gave her the rest of the day to think, which Mika spent mostly alone, walking the edge of Diego's territory where the wards hummed faint against her skin.
She thought about Corin, a man she'd never met who might have spent eleven years planning to unmake her. She thought about her mother, twenty-three years of silence that suddenly made a different kind of sense — not cowardice, but a woman trying to protect a daughter from a danger she couldn't name without endangering her further. She thought about the voice in her dreams, old and grieving and patient, and wondered how much of what it told her was true and how much was exactly the kind of lie something ancient would tell to get free.
She thought about Elena, too, and the fragment she still carried after thirty years — proof that s
