The fireworks faded from the sky almost as quickly as they had appeared.
Percival watched the last sparks dissolve into the night, but his thoughts drifted somewhere else entirely. For no clear reason, Violet's face rose in his mind.
He scanned the crowd again, searching for the figure he had grown used to seeing nearby.
She wasn't there.
"Percy? Percy! What are you spacing out for?"
Cynthia called his name several times before he finally came back to himself.
"Sorry, Cynthia."
As he looked down at Cynthia's soft, perfectly manicured fingers, his hands hesitated for a fraction of a second.
Violet's hands had never looked like that. Her fingers were rougher, the skin thickened from years of practice.
In the early years after she came to Morvani, she spent hours every day practicing
