Kate's POV
After Catherine left, I sat alone in the empty studio for a long time, until my eyes finally stung and went hot.
That goodbye settled something in me. Apart from life and death, it seemed, almost everything else still had room left in it. Room to bend. Room to change.
Catherine had once hired people to kill me. She had hated me the way I'd hated her on the day I learned she'd been the other woman in my marriage. And yet, just now, the two of us had stood in the same room and said goodbye like civilized strangers.
Ronald was dead. There were so many things I would never get to say to him now.
My mother was gone too, and with her, every answer I had never thought to ask for.
But Julian was still alive. So were Alaric and Cordelia.
Maybe the reason I kept flinching away from
