Mia didn't touch the feather. She stood over her own bed for a long moment, staring down at it the way you'd stare at something that had crawled up out of a memory instead of a stranger's hand, and let herself finally admit what her body had recognized before her mind caught up.
She'd seen this before.
Not a feather like this one. This exact feather — the same faint iridescent black, the same slight curl at the tip, the same impossible stillness, as if it had been placed rather than dropped. She'd seen it on the floor of a ballroom, half-hidden beneath the hem of her own wedding dress, in the seconds before Kade's hand closed around a knife handle. She hadn't thought about it since. She hadn't let herself think about anything from that night except the knife, the blood, the six words he'
