Prologue — "The Last Time I Said Her Name"
The compound sleeps like it doesn't trust the dark, which is fair, because I don't either.
I stand where I always stand — the east corridor, half a wall between me and the door that isn't locked, because locking it would mean admitting I check. Through the gap I can see the shape of her bed, the slope of her shoulder, the way her hand curls loose against the pillow like she's never once had a reason not to sleep easy.
She has no idea what it costs to look at her like this and then not.
Six years I've done this. Six years of watching from the wrong side of a door and calling it discipline instead of what it actually is, which is cowardice with better posture. Silas would laugh if he heard me say that. He wouldn't be wrong to.
I have not said Wren's name out loud since the week they took her. I don't need to say it. It lives under my skin the way a scar lives under a sleeve — you forget it's there until something drags across it, and then you remember exactly how deep it goes.
Lyra Everwood drags across it every day she doesn't know she's doing it.
She laughed tonight. At something Dorian said, something stupid, probably, knowing him — and the sound of it came down the hall and found me before I could brace for it, and my hand was a fist around a doorframe before I'd decided to make it one. That's the thing nobody tells you about wanting someone you've already buried a version of once. Your body remembers the shape of losing her before your mind's caught up to the fact that you're doing this again.
I am not doing this again.
I tell myself that the way I tell myself a lot of things — clearly, coldly, like an order given to a man who has never once disobeyed me.
The Tribunal does not care what a person feels. I learned that on my knees in a room with no windows, listening to men who'd never say her name wrong decide that she was, on balance, a liability worth removing. They did not call it killing her. They called it a correction. I have hated the sound of that word for six years and never let it show. Not to anyone. Not even her. Especially not her.
So I let Lyra believe what's easiest to believe. That I am cold because I am cold. That the silence is disinterest and not the only leash I have left to hold.
It is the one kindness I know how to give her — never letting her understand what she'd be signing up for, if she looked at me the way I look at her when she isn't watching.
Down the hall, her light goes out.
I stay a while longer anyway. Long enough to be sure. Long enough that if something came for her tonight, it would have to come through me first.
I tell myself that's all this is.
I am not entirely convinced.
Somewhere past the wall, a floorboard settles that shouldn’t. I don’t move for it. I’ve stopped moving for every sound that isn’t hers.
I turn from the door before I can talk myself into opening it.
I have gotten very good, over the years, at walking away from the one thing I want most.
Tonight, for the first time in a long time, it doesn't feel like enough.
