Wren’s POV
They come for me before the sun does.
I hear the key at about an hour when the light starts thinking about it, gray at the edges of the window, everything in the house still. Two sets of footsteps in the corridor. Garrick’s, which I know like my own heartbeat.
And another, lighter, that stops outside my door and waits.
The lock turns. Garrick doesn’t come in.
“Ten minutes,” he says to somebody I can’t see. “Then it’s done, and you’re gone before he’s back.”
“It takes as long as it takes.”
A woman’s voice. Older than I expected. Flat, tired, with an accent from somewhere further north than this valley has ever cared about.
And something in me lurches at the sound of it, hard, the way your foot goes through a stairs you thought was solid.
I know that voice.
I don’t know
