Third person POV
The papers were signed in the hush of midnight.
The storm outside had passed, but its memory still pressed against the windows like a phantom, howling now and then just to remind Charles of what he had done.
He had renamed her.
Sera, Elijah and Liana’s daughter, was now Scarlett.
She wouldn’t know her parents. She wouldn’t know her true name. She wouldn’t know anything about the blood she carried, or the war that took it from her.
And Charles had done that. With ink. With silence. With guilt.
Charles didn’t sleep much in those early weeks.
He stayed in the quiet rooms of the villa Elijah had left behind, the ones nobody else knew existed. And he watched the child, his goddaughter, his promise to the dead, grow from a tiny swaddled thing into something bright. Some
