Serena's POV
Marcus called me to the café on a Thursday.
Not the one he had revealed to me across a kitchen table, not the one I had stumbled into by accident — a different one entirely, in a different part of the city, a fact I hadn't known until Kael mentioned it with the careful neutrality he reserved for information he suspected would require time to land properly.
Vale & Co. he had said. Just that. And then he had watched my face.
I had made him repeat it.
Vale & Co. My father's name — my name — above a door, on a street I had walked past a hundred times without ever stopping, in a neighbourhood my father had loved for its unhurried pace and its old buildings and the way the morning light came through at a particular angle that he used to say reminded him of somewhere he'd been b
