I felt Mia go very still beside me, and I knew it meant every instinct in her had gone sharp and quiet at once, and when I looked at her face I saw something I hadn't expected — not fear, but the specific ache of finally seeing something you'd only known as a photograph become a real, breathing person standing thirty feet away.
"She's alive," Mia breathed. "Kael, she's actually alive."
"Stay back," Cole murmured, already scanning the tree line, the porch, the windows, doing the automatic threat assessment fifteen years at my side had trained into him. "We don't know what we're walking into."
We didn't have to decide. Marcus turned, some instinct of his own catching movement at the edge of the clearing, and I watched his face do something complicated when he saw us — not surprise exactly
