Freedom tasted like stale coffee and cold air.
I sat at my kitchen table, staring at the empty chair across from me. It had been twenty-four hours since Guilermo walked into the woods. Twenty-four hours since I had won the argument.
I had proven my point. I was independent. I was capable. I was alone.
The apartment was silent. Not the peaceful silence of a library, but the heavy, suffocating silence of a tomb. The wards hummed in the walls, Sibal’s invisible cage, but they felt different now. Before, they were bars keeping me in. Now, they were just walls keeping everything else out.
I stood up, the chair scraping loudly against the floor.
"Get it together, Lilura," I whispered to the empty room.
I had a job to do. I had a cover to maintain.
I dressed in my Coven grays. I pulled my
