AIDEN
She did not know I watched her draw.
This was not surveillance. I want to be precise about that, because precision matters to me and because the distinction is important. I was not watching her without her knowledge in any way that required concealment. I was in the balcony doorway, visible, available to be seen if she had looked up. She did not look up. She was drawing, and when Alessia George is drawing, she is not in the room anymore — she is somewhere the lines are taking her, somewhere behind her eyes, somewhere the rest of the world does not follow.
I had not known this about her. I had known her at thirteen and fifteen and the three years since as an absence, a name Logan said carefully, a gap in the shape of our pack that my wolf had been mapping with its eyes closed. I ha
