The silence in the empty nursery was more violent than the storm. It was a vacuum, a hollow space where the laughter and steady breathing of two children should have been, now replaced by the mocking whistle of the wind through the open window.
Cassian stood in the center of the room, his head bowed, his shoulders heaving. The air around him began to warp, distorted by a heat haze that had nothing to do with the hearth.
The scent of bitter almond Marcus’s scent, *Selene’s* blood, was a toxin in his lungs, turning his grief into something much older, much more primal.
"Cassian," Elena’s voice was a jagged shard of glass. She was standing by the window, clutching the tattered edge of a curtain, her eyes fixed on the black expanse of the forest below.
"They are moving toward the Iron Rid
