Lena's POV
I had been at Stormridge long enough now that the rhythm of the packhouse had stopped feeling foreign and started feeling like something I was learning to read, the way I had once learned to read the rhythm of Crestfall from the margins of it. I knew which corridors were busiest in the morning. I knew which council members nodded to me out of habit and which ones still performed neutrality like it cost them something. I knew the sound of Damien's study door when it meant he wanted to be left alone and the sound it made when it meant the opposite.
What I did not know, and what I was beginning to understand I might never fully know, was how much of him I was actually allowed to have.
He was careful with me. Not cold, not distant in the way he had been in Crestfall when I had fi
