LYSSARA
She did not run. Running meant she had not decided yet and she had decided before she finished hearing the words through the wall, so she walked with the specific controlled pace of a woman who had learned that the difference between panic and purpose was usually just a matter of which one you fed first and she had been making that choice deliberately since the morning she got up off a cold floor and kept going.
He was in his study and he looked up when I pushed the door open with the expression of a man who had been expecting me and had been calculating, with the accuracy of someone who had been paying attention for eight weeks, how long it would take me to come to him directly rather than wait to be told.
He had given me slightly more time than I had actually taken. I noted th
