The silence after Killian’s words wasn’t just silence.
It was heavy.
A kind of silence that cracked through bone and made the air hard to breathe.
Rose didn’t speak right away. She couldn’t. Her mind was too busy trying to wrap around the words that didn’t even feel real yet.
“Your father’s alive. And he’s been watching you since the day you were born.”
The phrase looped in her head like a siren.
Alive.
Watching.
Her father.
“I buried him,” she finally said. Her voice came out lower than she expected. “I was eight. I remember the coffin. The funeral. The gunshots in the air.”
Killian was calm. Unbothered. “It wasn’t him in that coffin.”
Her eyes snapped to him. “How do you know that?”
“Because I helped him disappear.”
Cassian, who’d been pacing in the corner like a storm gathe
