After
Aria
The kitchen went completely silent.
Not the tense silence of the last three weeks — the kind that meant something was coming. A different kind. The kind that arrives when something very large has stopped moving and the air hasn’t figured out what to do with the space yet.
Romano Voss was dead.
I read the message twice.
Looked at Caden.
His face was doing something I hadn’t seen before — not grief exactly, not relief exactly, the specific expression of a man processing the end of something that had been a defining force in his life for forty-two years. Like losing a war and a compass simultaneously. Like the thing you’d been fighting against was also the thing that had been telling you which direction to face and now both were gone at once.
“Caden,” I said quietly.
He lo
