𝕶𝕹𝕺𝖂𝕴𝕯𝕰𝕬

The Private Journal of Sloane Mairi — Basgiath War College, First Year

Entry One

I don't know why I'm writing this. Liam was the one who believed in letters. In putting things down on paper like the words meant something after you closed the page. He used to say if you couldn't write it, you probably hadn't figured out how to feel it yet.

I used to think that was stupid.

I think about it now more than I want to admit.

The parapet didn't kill me. I know some people are surprised by that. I saw it on their faces — that flicker of oh, she made it that was half relief and half something else, something colder, something that's been trained into every rider here. They size you up. They calculate. They file you under asset or liability and move on before you even steady your breathing. I was still shaking when I hit the other side. My knees almost buckled. Nobody saw. I made sure nobody saw.

Liam would have been waiting. That's the thing that hits me when the fortress goes quiet and the training halls empty and there's nothing left to fight against. He would have been right there — probably making some absurd joke about how I took three seconds longer than he'd estimated, probably already reaching out to steady me before I even registered I was unsteady. That was Liam. He saw things before they became problems. He fixed things before you knew they were broken.

He's not here.

I keep having to remind myself of that, and every single time it lands like the first time.

I met the girl today. Violet Sorrengail. I knew I would. I knew she'd be here, walking around in her rider leathers with her silver hair and her two dragons like the world had bent itself specifically to accommodate her. I knew it would make me want to put my fist through something solid. It did. The anger came up so fast I almost choked on it — hot and clean and righteous — and I let it out, I said things I meant to say, and she just stood there and took it. She didn't flinch. She didn't apologise the way guilty people apologise, all hollow and performative. She just stood there and took it, and that made me angrier, and I don't quite know what to do with the fact that I've been replaying that moment since lights out.

I wanted her to crumble. I wanted to see something break in her the way things broke in me.

She didn't. She doesn't.

I'm not sure what that means yet.

Entry Two

They told me Liam wrote letters. Fifty of them.

Violet told me. She said it like it was a gift and a condition at the same time — one per week, Sloane, but only if you train with Imogen. Like I'm a child who needs bribing. Like I'm something fragile that has to be coaxed.

I wanted to throw it back in her face. I considered it seriously for about four full seconds, standing in that corridor with the stone walls pressing in on either side of us, feeling the rebellion relic tighten against my arm the way it always does when my pulse spikes. Four seconds of no, absolutely not, I don't need your charity and I don't need her letters.

Then I thought about his handwriting.

I haven't seen his handwriting in two years. I have one letter from the year before he died — one, because we weren't allowed more than that, because the world is structured in ways that punish the people who can least afford to lose anything — and I've read it so many times the fold lines have gone soft. I know every word. I've stopped letting myself read it because I'm afraid of the day it stops feeling like him.

Fifty letters. Fifty weeks of him sitting somewhere in this fortress thinking of me, choosing his words, deciding what I needed to know and what he wanted to say.

I said yes.

I'm not proud of how quickly I said yes.

Imogen Cardulo is terrifying. She fights like she's angry at the concept of fighting, like she's offended by the fact that her body needs to work this hard to do damage. She's efficient and cold and she has absolutely no interest in whether I find it difficult. I respect that, actually. I don't want sympathy from anyone in this quadrant. I want someone who looks at me and sees a rider, not a dead boy's grieving sister.

Imogen looks at me and sees a problem to be solved. That's close enough.

I'm earning his words. That's what I tell myself on the days when everything hurts and the anger goes flat and all that's left underneath it is the grey, endless exhaustion of missing someone. I'm earning them. It's the only kind of transaction that makes sense to me right now — effort for something real, sweat for something true. The rest of this place deals in politics and power and the peculiar cruelty of people who've decided that survival is the same thing as worth.

Liam navigated all of that with that ridiculous easy smile of his. I never understood how.

I'm not going to smile my way through anything. But I am going to survive it.

He asked her to look after me.

She told me that, too, and I don't know how I feel about it. Liam, in his last moments, with everything crashing down around him, used some of his final breath to make sure I'd be okay. That's so completely him that it makes my throat close. That's so Liam — giving away pieces of himself right up until there was nothing left to give.

I wanted to be furious about it. I tried.

I just ended up crying in the dark, pressing my face into my pillow so nobody in the adjacent cots would hear.

Entry Three

First letter.

I won't write what it said. Some things aren't meant to be copied out — they exist in one place, on one piece of paper, in one specific handwriting, and the moment you transcribe them you've turned them into something else. Something public. Something that can be shared and debated and reduced.

I will say this: he sounded like himself. That's what I wasn't prepared for. I'd built up this idea of the letters as relics, as artefacts, as sacred objects to be handled carefully — I'd made them so large in my mind that I forgot they'd just be Liam. Talking the way he talked. Making the kind of small jokes that only land if you know him, the kind that aren't quite jokes so much as affectionate observations delivered with that lilt in his voice that I can still hear perfectly in my head when I close my eyes.

He told me about the parapet. His parapet. He said he thought about me the whole way across, which means I was probably the reason he didn't fall, and also the reason he almost did, because thinking too hard about the people you love is a liability when you need to focus. He said he figured I'd be furious at him for saying that. He was right. I am. I also love him so much it's a physical thing, a pressure behind my sternum that doesn't go away.

I haven't spoken to Violet about it. I don't know how to. We're doing this strange circling thing — she leaves room for me and I don't fill it and we both pretend the distance is fine. It isn't fine. I know it isn't fine. But the alternative requires something from me that I'm not sure I have yet. She knew him in ways I didn't get to. She knew him as the person he became after we were separated, after the foster families and Basgiath and Xaden Riorson and all of it — she knew the version of my brother that I only know through fifty letters and a ghost that keeps appearing in quiet moments.

I'm not ready to compare notes.

Thoirt chose me. My dragon — Thoirt, red daggertail, stubborn as anything, with a temperament that my instructor diplomatically described as distinctive. He looked at me on Threshing Day with those amber eyes and I felt the bond click into place like a lock finding its key, and my first thought — I am not ashamed of this — was Liam would have loved him. He would have. He would have made some terrible pun about his name and then immediately tried to befriend him, and Thoirt would have pretended to find him irritating while secretly enjoying the attention, because Thoirt has already demonstrated that he is fundamentally incapable of resisting genuine warmth.

That's something, I suppose. I came here with nothing but a relic on my arm and a knot of grief where my family used to be. Now I have a dragon, and a grudging training arrangement, and a stack of letters accumulating one week at a time.

It's not enough.

It's also not nothing.

Entry Four

Dain Aetos looked at me today like he expected me to attack him, which — fair. I've thought about it. I've thought about it carefully and at length and in satisfying detail, and if Imogen hadn't explained in her particular flat way that the political fallout would be considerable, I might have done something regrettable by now.

He was there. He was there and Liam died and Dain came back and that simple, unfair arithmetic lives in me like a splinter that's worked its way too deep to pull out clean. I know it's not logic. I know grief doesn't do logic. I know Liam wouldn't want me burning bridges over his memory — he'd want me building things, he always wanted me building things, he used to say you've got more capacity than you're using, Sloane, you're spending it all on being angry when you could be spending it on being good.

I carry that like a bruise.

Being good feels very far away most days.

But here's what I've been turning over in the dark, when sleep won't come and the relic itches and I lie here cataloguing everything I've lost: I am still here. That is a fact. I crossed the parapet and I bonded a dragon and I've earned six letters and I am still here, which is more than some people get to say, which is more than Liam got to say. And if there's anything his voice in those letters keeps returning to — any thread that runs through every word he found to write to me — it's that I'm capable of more than I think.

He believed that before I'd done anything worth believing in.

I used to find that annoying. The relentlessness of his faith in me. The way he'd say you'll be fine like it was a statement of observable fact rather than a hope. I used to want to shake him and say you don't know that, stop saying it like you know that.

Now I'd give anything to hear him say it one more time.

I don't know what I'm becoming in this place. I don't know if the person I'm turning into would recognise the girl who walked in here — blond hair and fury and fifty unread letters waiting for her. Maybe that's fine. Maybe that's how it's supposed to work. You walk into Basgiath and you get broken down into components and you put yourself back together with whatever's still functional, and whatever's left at the end is a rider.

Or a body at the bottom of the gorge.

I intend to be a rider.

Liam intended to be a rider too. He was a rider, the best kind — steady and warm and impossible to shake. He was a rider and it still wasn't enough to save him, and that truth sits in me like stone, heavy and permanent and impossible to shift.

But here's the other truth, the one I come back to when the first one tries to flatten me:

He wrote me fifty letters.

Fifty weeks of his first year, he sat somewhere in this fortress and chose to write to me. In the middle of War Games and signet training and everything Xaden was surely pulling him into — in the middle of surviving — he wrote to me. He didn't know if he'd live long enough for me to read them. He wrote them anyway.

That's what love looks like when it's real. Not the kind that comes easy, not the kind that costs nothing — the kind that you choose, deliberately, with full knowledge of the cost, over and over again in small and ordinary moments.

I'm going to be worthy of those letters.

I don't know yet what that means. But I think it means I stay. I train. I let Thoirt be loud and difficult and mine. I earn each letter. I let myself, slowly, learn to exist in the shape of the world without him in it.

I think it means I stop looking at Violet Sorrengail like she owes me something.

He asked her to look after me. She's trying. She keeps trying, even when I make it hard, even when I give her nothing back but hostility and a closed door. She keeps trying.

That's the kind of person he would have chosen. That's the kind of person he did choose.

I'm not ready to call it forgiveness. I might never be ready to call it that.

But I'm starting to think maybe it doesn't have to be forgiveness.

Maybe it can just be: I see you. I know why he trusted you. I'm still here.

For now, that's enough.

Here is what I know about myself: I am a person who bakes when she doesn't know what else to do with her hands.

Cupcakes, mostly. Sometimes cookies, when things are really bad. Once, after Drake showed up at the gates of Hawthorne House and every camera in Texas got a photo of me looking like exactly the kind of girl the tabloids expected Avery's sister to be — embarrassing, fragile, a liability in dark lipstick — I made four hundred and thirty-two cupcakes in one afternoon. I counted. I had a lot of time.

Guys I know the title isnt very good but plssss read till the end (Its from brady's prespective btw)

The problem with Avery Grambs — and I say this as someone who has spent a considerable amount of time cataloguing her problems — is that she doesn't know when to quit.

Most people, when they find themselves in a house full of Hawthorne brothers, take one look at the situation and make a reasonable calculation. The Hawthornes are rich, unpredictable, and operating under a set of rules that nobody bothered to write down. The smart play is to keep your head down, collect whatever inheritance Tobias Hawthorne has dangled in front of you, and stay out of the crossfire.

Avery does not make the smart play. Ever.

I noticed it the first time I really watched her — not the way Jameson watches her, like she's a puzzle he's been handed and can't put down, but the way you watch someone when you're trying to figure out what they're actually made of. She'd been dropped into Hawthorne House with a target painted on her back and a grandfather's ghost whispering riddles in her ear, and instead of flinching, she'd leaned into it. Like the danger was interesting to her. Like she'd decided the only acceptable response to being thrown into the deep end was to learn to breathe underwater.

I've been around the Hawthorne brothers my whole life. I know what it looks like when someone underestimates them. I also know — and this is the part I didn't expect — what it looks like when they've underestimated someone else.

Avery Grambs was going to be a problem. For them. For me. For everyone.

The thing about growing up on the edges of the Hawthorne world is that you learn early what you are and what you aren't. I was the best friend. The one Xander called when he needed a second opinion on something that would probably end in fire. The one who knew where the bodies were buried — metaphorically, mostly — and kept his mouth shut about it. I understood my role. I was good at it.

And then Tobias Hawthorne died and left his entire fortune to a girl none of us had ever heard of, and suddenly none of the old rules applied anymore.

My mom had her theories. She always has theories, neat and tidy explanations for why things happen the way they do. I've learned to listen carefully and believe about half of it. The half I wasn't sure about — the half that had to do with secrets Tobias Hawthorne might have taken to his grave — that was the half that kept me up at night.

I didn't want to be suspicious of Avery. That felt important to say, even just to myself. She hadn't done anything wrong. She'd shown up, same as anyone would, pulled toward the gravity of all that money and all those unanswered questions. She hadn't asked for any of this.

But my mom was scared. And when my mom is scared, I pay attention.

The hardest thing about loyalty is that it doesn't come with a manual. Nobody hands you a list of rules that tells you when to hold the line and when to step back. You just have to feel your way through it, and hope that when it counts, you made the right call.

I'd known the Hawthornes long enough to know they would be fine. Grayson had his iron spine and his ten-year plan and his terrifying ability to make you feel like a disappointment without ever raising his voice. Jameson had his chaos and his instincts and Avery, apparently, now. Nash had already survived things none of us talked about. Xander — Xander was Xander, which meant he'd find a way to turn the apocalypse into a group project with assigned roles and a color-coded chart.

They'd be fine.

It was the things I didn't know that bothered me.

The secrets that lived in the walls of Hawthorne House. The ones my mom was afraid of. The ones that had somehow, in ways I still didn't fully understand, pulled Avery Grambs out of her ordinary life and dropped her into the middle of all of it.

I wasn't trying to be her enemy. I want to be clear about that.

But I wasn't sure yet that I could be something else.

She caught me watching her once — really watching, not the casual kind of noticing you can pass off as coincidence. She didn't look away. Didn't get uncomfortable. Just met my eyes with this steady, measuring look, like she was running the same calculation I was.

What are you? she was asking. Whose side are you on?

Fair question.

I almost smiled. I think she almost did too.

The problem with Avery Grambs is that she's very hard to hate, even when hating her would be a lot more convenient.

I haven't figured out yet whether that's going to be a problem or not.

I'm starting to think it might be.

I've been in rooms full of people who thought they were the smartest person there. Lawyers, hedge fund managers, the kind of guys who wear their Rolex loose so everyone can see it slide down their wrist. I've sat across from all of them, and I've walked away with what I came for every single time. You want to know how? I don't walk in hoping I'm the smartest. I walk in assuming I'm not, and I find the person who is, and then I figure out exactly what they want badly enough to bleed for.

That's not manipulation. That's just reading the room.

Brady used to say I had no soul. Said it like it was an insult. Like it was supposed to sting. I told him: a soul is a liability in a room where everyone else is trying to take something from you. He didn't have a comeback for that. Brady never does — he just looks at you with those quiet eyes like you're something he's still deciding whether to pity.

I don't need his pity. I don't need anyone's.

The island is beautiful. I noticed that the way I notice everything — clocked it, filed it away, moved on. The cliffs are too steep on the north side for a clean escape route. The dock is a bottleneck. There are exactly three structures with line-of-sight to the main house, which means three blind spots, which means three angles nobody's watching. See, that's the thing about pretty places — everyone stops thinking when they're in one. They start feeling instead, and feeling slows you down.

The girl — Gigi — she felt everything. I could tell inside of thirty seconds. She walked onto that island like it personally owed her something joyful, like she expected the whole world to keep delivering good news. Half-pint. All sunshine and zero armor. Exactly the kind of player who gets used.

Which is what Brady planned to do.

I'm not saying I'm better than Brady. I'm saying I saw it, and he knew I saw it, and that's the difference between us now. That's been the difference between us for years.

Calla. Her name sits in my chest like a stone I swallowed and can't pass. Brady thinks he knows the story. Brady has always thought that, his version of events polished smooth from how many times he's turned it over, all the rough edges worn down into something that makes him the good guy. The loyal one. The one who never gave up.

He wasn't there.

He doesn't know what she said to me. What she chose. And I'll be damned if I'm going to break that open in front of a room full of strangers playing a billionaire's parlor game just so Brady can feel vindicated.

Some things you carry alone. That's not weakness. That's the whole point.

The puzzle in the first room — three variables, rotating cipher, false bottom in the panel on the left — I had it in four minutes. Gigi had it in three. I didn't say anything about that. I filed it away instead, same as the cliffs, same as the dock, same as Brady's tells when he's lying versus when he's performing. Information is only valuable if you know when to use it.

And maybe — maybe — when she fell, when I heard the sound of it and turned back without deciding to, without calculating the odds or the cost —

Maybe that was just reflex.

I picked her up. We didn't make the dock. Our team was out.

Brady said I went soft. He said it quietly, the way he says everything, like he's disappointed in me rather than angry, which is worse.

I told him to go to hell.

I play to win. I have always played to win. And somewhere between the cipher and the cliffs and Gigi Grayson trusting me with her weight like it was the most natural thing in the world, I think I forgot, for about forty-five seconds, exactly what winning was supposed to cost.

I haven't forgotten since.

I have never been the kind of person who speaks just to fill silence. Silence, I have learned, is often more honest than anything you could say to replace it. It tells you things. It shows you who is comfortable with stillness and who is afraid of it. Most people are afraid of it.

I am not most people.

I grew up understanding that the world would not be kind simply because you deserved kindness. That was perhaps the first real thing I ever learned — not from a book, not from instruction, but from watching. From paying attention when everyone else was too busy making noise. The Sanctuary taught me many things but that particular lesson came earlier. It came from life itself, the way life tends to teach you its hardest truths before you are old enough to argue with them.

There was a moment — one specific moment — that I return to more than I would care to admit.

We had just come back from something difficult. I will not go into the details. The details are not the point. The point is that we came back, and not everyone who should have was there when we did. And I remember standing very still in the middle of everything, all the movement and noise around me, people checking on each other, voices overlapping, and I felt completely separate from all of it. Not disconnected — I want to be precise about that. Not cold. Just — still. Like something inside me had gone very quiet and was waiting.

I have always processed things that way. Inward first. Outward never, if I can help it.

What I felt in that moment was not grief exactly, though grief was part of it. It was something closer to resolve. A tightening. Like the part of you that was still asking questions finally stops asking and simply — knows. Knows what you are doing here. Knows why you keep going. Knows that stopping is not something you are capable of, not because you are fearless, but because the alternative is unthinkable.

People misread me. I am aware of this. They see the way I carry myself and they assume arrogance, or distance, or that I think myself above the mess of it all. I do not correct them. It is not my responsibility to manage other people's assumptions about who I am. But I will say this — everything I do, every calculated word, every measured step, is in service of something larger than myself. That is not arrogance. That is discipline. There is a difference, even if most people cannot see it.

The Sanctuary is not perfect. I have never pretended that it is. Nothing built by human hands and human hope ever is. But it is real. What we are trying to do here is real. And in a world that has spent years making people doubt their own eyes, their own instincts, their own worth — real is not a small thing.

It is everything.

I carry that moment with me still. The stillness. The knowing. On the days when this is harder than it should be, when the cost of all of it makes itself known in ways I cannot simply reason away, I go back to it. I let it remind me.

We do not do this because it is easy. We do it because we are the kind of people who cannot look away.

And I have made my peace with that.

People always ask me what it's like, coming from the Sanctuary. Like they expect me to say it was paradise. Like they expect me to talk about it the way you'd talk about something soft and easy.

It wasn't soft. Nothing about any of this is soft.

But I'll tell you what it was. It was ours. Every cracked wall, every cold morning, every face I knew by name before I knew anything else about the world outside. That meant something. That still means something, even now when I'm standing in the middle of all of this — all of this chaos that doesn't stop, that just keeps coming in waves like it's testing us, like it wants to see how much we can take before we break.

We don't break. That's the thing people don't understand about us.

I remember the first time I really felt it — that certainty. We'd had a bad few days. The kind of days that make you question whether any of it is worth it. Whether you keep pushing or whether you just — stop. And I was sitting outside, not thinking about anything in particular, just tired all the way down to my bones, and Nouria came and sat next to me without saying a word. Didn't try to fix anything. Didn't give me a speech. Just sat there, like she was saying I'm here without actually saying it.

And something in me just settled.

That's what the Sanctuary is. Not a place, not really. It's that feeling. The knowing that the person next to you isn't going anywhere. That whatever comes at you, you face it together.

I've seen people come to us from the outside — people who've been alone for so long they don't even know how to accept help anymore. They flinch when someone offers them something. They sleep with one eye open for weeks. And I get it. I do. The world out there doesn't exactly hand you reasons to trust people. The Reestablishment made sure of that. Made sure everyone was too scared, too broken, too busy just trying to survive to ever think about standing together.

That was the point, wasn't it. Divide everyone. Make them feel like they're on their own. And it worked, for a long time. It worked on a lot of people.

But not on us.

I think about the ones we've lost. I don't let myself do it often because it doesn't help anyone, least of all me, but sometimes it finds you whether you want it to or not. A smell, a sound, someone laughing in a way that reminds you of someone else. And for a second it hits you all over again. Everything we've given to this. Everything this fight has cost.

And then I think — they knew. Every single one of them knew what they were signing up for. Nobody at the Sanctuary is naive. Nobody is here because they didn't think about it. They're here because they thought about it and showed up anyway. That's the kind of people we are. That's the kind of people I want to be standing next to when everything goes sideways.

I don't talk about it much. That's not really my style — going on and on about feelings like some kind of open book. But I carry it with me. Every mission, every fight, every moment where I'm not sure how things are going to go, I carry all of it with me.

The walls. The cold mornings. The faces.

And honestly? That's enough. That has always been enough.

I have always understood fabric better than people.

Fabric is honest. You pull at a seam and it tells you exactly where it's weak. You hold a hem up to the light and it shows you every flaw, every place a needle went crooked, every stitch that was too tight or not tight enough. There are no surprises in fabric. There is only the work, and the truth of it, and what you choose to do next.

People are not like that.

People will look you in the eye and say I love you and mean it completely and break your heart at the same time, and you won't even know it happened until much later — until you're alone somewhere quiet, running your fingers over something they left behind, and the shape of the thing finally lands in your chest.

Adam told me he loved me the way he used to love her.

I don't think he understood what he'd said. I don't think he knew how I held that sentence afterwards, turning it over like a piece of cloth with a stain I couldn't quite get out. The way he used to. Past tense. Honest, the way fabric is honest. He didn't mean to wound me with it. That's the thing about Adam — he means so little of the pain he causes. He is not a cruel man. He is just a man who has already given everything he had once before, and what's left for me is what remained after.

I chose it anyway.

I want to be clear about that. I want to say it plainly, the way I say everything plainly, because I have never been the kind of person who wraps things in extra words. I chose this. I chose him — the careful version, the reconstructed version, the version of Adam Kent that woke up after Juliette Ferrars and learned how to be someone's husband even if he couldn't always remember how to be fully present. I chose Gigi and Roman and the life we've built in the Sanctuary, stitch by slow stitch, the way I build everything.

Gigi has his hands. I noticed that early — the shape of them, the way she holds things so carefully, like she already knows things can break. Roman is louder, all elbows and questions, and he looks like me in a way that still surprises me sometimes, still makes something catch in my throat when I'm not expecting it. They are mine. Entirely, completely, terrifyingly mine. When Roman wakes screaming from nightmares I am already moving before I'm awake, and when Gigi brings me a drawing — crooked lines, bright colors, completely earnest — I feel something that has no name in any language I know.

This is real. I remind myself of that. This is real and it is mine and it counts.

But I would be lying if I said I never think about it. About her.

Juliette — I can say her name now, which is something. I couldn't always. There was a time when even thinking it felt like pressing on a bruise, that particular sharp ache that tells you something underneath hasn't healed right. But I've learned to say it the way you learn to say the name of a place you've never been but that someone you love has described so many times you can almost see it. Juliette. She is the city Adam lived in before he came here. I am where he settled after.

I've made peace with that.

I'm not sure Adam knows that I have, because we don't talk about it. That's another thing about him — there are rooms in Adam Kent that have the doors closed, and he doesn't open them, and after a while you stop knocking. You learn which hallways you're allowed in and you make those hallways as warm as you can. You hang things on the walls. You fill the space.

I am very good at filling space. I've always had that skill — give me a length of cloth and a problem and I will find the shape of a solution. Give me a set of hands that need protecting and I will make gloves that fit like a second skin. Give me a man with rooms he won't open and I will love him in every room he lets me into and not grieve too loudly for the rest.

It's enough. It has to be enough.

Gigi comes into the studio this evening while I'm working — she always does, she is drawn to color the way both Adam and I are, which is the first thing I think of when someone tells me children inherit from their parents. Not my eyes, not Adam's jawline, but this — this pull toward making things, toward touching fabric and feeling its weight and understanding what it wants to become. She climbs into the chair across from me and watches my hands with that particular focused attention that means she is memorizing something.

"What are you making?" she asks.

"A jacket," I say. "For someone who gets cold."

She considers this very seriously. "Does the jacket know what it's going to be?"

I look up at her. She is four years old and she asks questions like this and every single time I feel something in my chest crack open like a window.

"Not yet," I say. "But it will."

She seems satisfied by that. She slides off the chair and disappears back down the hall, and I hear her collide gently with Adam on his way in — hear his low hey, careful and her shriek of laughter and then Roman's voice joining in from somewhere further back, all of it tangled and warm and ours.

Adam appears in the doorway a moment later. He looks tired. He usually looks a little tired now, a tiredness that's become so familiar it's just part of his face, like the line between his brows or the grey beginning to come in at his temple. He looks at me and something passes between us — that wordless language you build with someone over years, the one that lives in the spaces between sentences.

He crosses the room and his hand settles on my shoulder. Just for a moment. Just briefly.

It isn't the love from the stories. It isn't the kind that breaks you open and remakes you, the kind that leaves marks like Juliette left on him — permanent, bone-deep, impossible to unlove. I know that. I have always known that.

But it is something.

It is a man who comes home. It is hands that have learned to reach for me. It is Gigi's laugh down the hall and Roman's questions at breakfast and a jacket slowly becoming what it was meant to be.

I pick up my needle.

I keep working.

I have learned to wear my face like armor.

It is a skill passed down through my blood — through my mother's careful hands adjusting my hijab before council meetings, through my father's eyes that said be brilliant, but not too loud. I learned early that a woman who knows too much must present herself as though she knows just enough. That the most dangerous thing I could do was let someone see the full shape of my mind.

So I smile. I pour tea. I ask questions I already know the answers to, because men like to feel they are teaching you something. I let them explain things to me slowly, carefully, as though I am a child learning to read, and I nod at the right moments and furrow my brow just enough to seem engaged but not threatening.

It is exhausting, performing smallness.

But it is also, I have found, extraordinarily useful.

I think about Haider. I think about him the way you think about a bruise you keep pressing — not because it feels good, but because you need to know it is still real. My brother, who laughed too easily and trusted too freely and loved a world that did not deserve him. He used to say that I was the sharp one and he was the kind one, as though the two could not exist in the same person. As though you had to choose.

I think he chose wrong. I think the world punished him for it.

And still — I cannot bring myself to wish he had been different. I cannot wish the warmth out of him, even now, even knowing what it cost. Haider with cold eyes and a careful tongue would not have been Haider at all. He would have been me. And the world already has one of me. I am not sure it could survive two.

I carry him quietly. That is the only way I know how to grieve — silently, in the spaces between sentences, in the half-second before I speak when I think what would he say here. He would probably say something that made everyone in the room laugh. He would have diffused the tension before anyone noticed it had arrived.

I am less elegant about it. I tend to let the tension sit. I find it tells me things.

The Reestablishment wants obedience dressed up as order. They want children who never learned to question whether the table they're sitting at was worth a seat. They want people who will look at a burning world and call it a controlled fire. I was never that child. My parents built me for survival, yes, but they also — quietly, carefully, in the language of late nights and whispered history — built me to know. To see the machinery behind the curtain and understand exactly which gear, if removed, would bring the whole thing down.

I have been cataloguing gears for a very long time.

Warner — and I do think of him as Warner now, not Anderson, not the Supreme Commander's heir, but the person underneath all of that inherited damage — understands this in a way most people don't. He was built in a different forge than me, shaped by cruelty where I was shaped by expectation, but we arrived at the same place: the careful study of power, the patient observation of weakness, the knowledge that the most dangerous person in any room is the one everyone has already underestimated.

We recognized each other immediately. I think that frightened him a little. Good.

And Juliette.

Juliette, who keeps trying to figure out what she is, as though the answer is a fixed thing, as though she is not still becoming. I want to take her by the shoulders sometimes and say stop trying to find the edges of yourself — expand. She has spent so long being told she is too much that she has started doing the work for them, containing herself, rounding off her own sharp corners.

I know what that costs. I do it every day by choice, as strategy. She does it because she was taught that her existence required an apology.

That makes me angrier than almost anything else.

I pull my scarf tighter and step into the corridor, and I smile at the man who holds the door open for me as though he is doing me a favor, as though I did not already know three ways to bring him to his knees without ever raising my voice.

Thank you, I say.

I say it warmly. I say it like I mean it.

The armor holds.

It always holds.

But underneath it — underneath the composure and the careful words and the smile I have practiced until it feels like breathing — I am still Haider's sister. I am still the girl who sat on rooftops and looked at the stars and believed, stupidly, beautifully, that the people she loved were permanent.

The night was the kind of quiet that felt like it was waiting for something.

Mak had learned not to trust quiet. Quiet was what came before his father's footsteps in the hall. Quiet was the moment before a blade. The streets of Loot had taught him to read silence the way other people read faces — every variation of it, every shade. This quiet, the kind that settled over the slums after the vendors shuttered their stalls and the drunks found somewhere warmer to be miserable, was the kind that should have felt safe.

It didn't.

He stood at the corner of the alley where he always waited, where the crooked lamp post threw more shadow than light, and he turned the sewing needle over in his fingers. It was a ridiculous thing to be holding. He was aware of that. He'd been aware of it since he'd found it at the metalsmith's quarter three streets over — a small, slender thing with patterns worked into the handle, tiny and intricate, the kind of craftsmanship that said someone cared. He'd told himself it was practical. She was a seamstress. She worked with needles. The one she'd been using had a bent tip she kept complaining about under her breath, muttering to herself like she didn't know he was listening.

He was always listening.

That was the problem with Adena. She talked so much that he'd stopped hearing it as noise somewhere along the way and started hearing it as something else entirely. She talked about the sticky buns from the vendor on Fifth, about the way the Imperial fabric was harder to work with than it looked, about some memory of Paedyn from years ago that made her laugh in the middle of saying it. And he would stand there with his arms crossed and his expression like stone and not say a single word, and somehow that had become a conversation. Somehow she had decided that his silence was participation, and infuriatingly, she had been right.

He closed his fingers around the needle.

She wasn't here.

He'd known she wouldn't be before he'd even turned down the alley — something cold had settled in his chest the moment he'd seen the fort dark and unlit, no warm flicker of her little candle in the window of their spot. He'd told himself he was early. He'd told himself she'd gotten caught up with something. He'd told himself a dozen reasonable explanations in the time it took him to walk the last twenty paces and find no sign of her.

The problem with being someone who did not let himself want things was that when he finally did, he had no practice at the patience it required.

He had spent most of his life cutting things off at the root before they could grow into anything that could be taken from him. He'd learned that lesson young, with a father whose version of love had been a closed fist and a lesson about weakness. He'd learned it again on the road with Hera, the two of them burning down everything behind them to survive. You didn't get attached to places. You didn't get attached to things. You kept moving, kept calculating, kept your eyes ahead and your wants minimal, because the more you wanted the more there was to lose, and Mak had already lost more than he intended to catalog.

And then there had been Adena.

Adena, who had the most inconveniently bright eyes he'd ever seen in a place like this, where most people's eyes went dull from the work of surviving. Adena, who had looked at him the first day with her chin tipped up like she wasn't half his size and twice afraid, and said I'm not doing this for you, I'm doing this for Paedyn, as if he needed reminding that he wasn't the kind of person people did things for. Adena, who had shoved her way into every quiet moment he'd built for himself until the quiet started to feel like her, and now it felt like absence.

He should have stopped it earlier. He'd known what was happening. He'd watched it the way you watched a fire you'd accidentally started — with the specific awareness that you had made a mistake and the specific inability to bring yourself to put it out. Every time she'd laughed at something he hadn't meant to be funny. Every time she'd reached for him and then stopped herself, like she was remembering he wasn't the sort that welcomed it. Every time he'd made himself look away and found his eyes coming back.

He'd made her a promise. Food, protection, passage to see Paedyn. A transaction. Clean and simple. He was good at those.

He was considerably less good at whatever this had become.

Mak looked down at the needle in his palm. He didn't do things like this. He didn't wander to metalsmith quarters looking for small beautiful objects to put in someone's hands. He didn't stand in dark alleys with something he'd bought with his own coin, waiting, with a feeling in his chest he didn't have a name for and didn't particularly want one.

A sound down the far end of the alley.

He straightened immediately, every muscle pulling taut, his hand moving on instinct toward the blade at his hip — and then he registered it wasn't footsteps, just a cat overturning something, and he let out a breath through his nose that was embarrassingly ragged.

She wasn't here.

He should leave. Come back tomorrow. He could give her the needle tomorrow, or he didn't have to give it to her at all — he could pitch it somewhere and say nothing and she would never have to know he'd stood in the cold like an idiot for half an hour holding a gift like it was evidence of something.

He didn't leave.

He leaned back against the wall instead, the stone cold through his jacket, and he looked up at the narrow strip of sky between the buildings — mostly clouds, one stubborn star managing to get through somewhere to the east. He thought about Hera, about the last time he'd seen her face through the castle corridor and the way she'd looked at him like she was trying to memorize it, like she already knew that time was running out. He thought about what happened to people in the Trials. He thought about what happened to people in this city in general, to Ordinaries and low Elites alike, to anyone the King decided was no longer useful.

He thought about Adena.

He thought about the men who had followed her in the market, and what he had done to them afterward, in a quiet alley not unlike this one, and felt absolutely nothing close to regret about it.

That was the thing he couldn't cut off at the root. Not the soft feeling — he could have managed the soft feeling, buried it, starved it out. It was the other thing. The thing that had reared up in his chest the moment he'd seen them crowding her, something old and vicious and entirely too awake after years of careful suppression. He'd wanted to take them apart. He'd wanted it with a clarity he usually only felt about his own survival.

That was how he'd known he was in trouble.

He pushed off the wall eventually, when the cold had worked its way fully into his hands and the star had disappeared behind the clouds and the street had gone from quiet to truly empty. He looked at the needle one more time — the little etched patterns, the clean taper of it — and then he tucked it into his breast pocket, close to where his pulse was louder than he'd like.

He would see her tomorrow.

He would give it to her then, along with something gruff about her old needle being a liability, so it couldn't be called sentiment. He would stand with his arms crossed and she would call him something affectionate and exasperated and he would not smile, and the morning would be ordinary, and he would feel ordinary, and everything would be fine.

He turned back toward the dark, and walked home, and did not let himself think about the fact that he already knew — in the specific, bone-deep way he knew most things he refused to say out loud — that nothing about Adena had ever been ordinary.

And nothing that involved her, from here on out, was going to be fine.

The tie was strangling him again.

Nick adjusted it with one hand, balancing the tray of champagne flutes with the other, and reminded himself — like he did every shift — that it was just fabric. It wasn't actually trying to kill him. It just felt that way. Danny would've said he was being dramatic. Danny said that a lot, before.

The ballroom was all chandeliers and magnolias tonight. Some kind of pre-season gathering, the kind where the women wore pearls like armour and the men shook hands like they were sealing deals, because they probably were. Nick had learned early on that nothing in this world was just a party. Everything was a transaction. You just had to know what currency was being used.

He moved through the room the way he'd learned to — like furniture. Invisible on purpose. It had taken him a few shifts to get it right, that particular brand of invisibility. You had to move with purpose but not urgency. You had to look like you belonged to the room without looking like you thought you belonged in it. There was a difference. A big one. These people could smell the distinction like bloodhounds.

People took glasses off his tray without looking at him, which was fine. Better than fine, actually. Looking at him would've meant acknowledging he existed, and then they'd have to think about why he was here and they were there, and nobody wanted to ruin their evening with that particular thought. Nick certainly wasn't going to ruin it for them. Not yet, anyway.

He kept moving.

A man in a navy blazer laughed at something, the sound ricocheting off the marble floors, and Nick clocked him without turning his head. Senator something. He'd seen his face in the papers. Nick had started keeping a mental catalogue months ago — names, faces, cars. Especially cars. Every man in this room probably owned three of them, and Nick knew makes and models the way other people knew sports stats. It was a useful kind of knowledge, these days.

He thought about Danny.

He was always thinking about Danny, underneath everything else, like a song stuck on loop that you couldn't quite tune out no matter how loud everything else got. Danny, who would've hated every single inch of this room and said so, loudly, probably while eating something off one of the little silver trays without asking. Danny, who'd never learned to make himself small for anyone. Danny, who'd been walking home from a party — not one like this, an actual party, the kind with sticky floors and bad music — because he hadn't wanted to get in a car with someone who'd been drinking. Because he was responsible like that. Because he was careful.

And someone hadn't been.

Nick's grip tightened around the edge of the tray. He loosened it. Breathed. Kept his face the way he'd trained it to stay — neutral, pleasant enough, the expression of someone who is simply here to refill your glass and has no opinions about anything whatsoever. It was the most exhausting performance he'd ever given, and he gave it five nights a week.

He swapped out his empty tray for a full one at the kitchen pass and turned back to the room.

That was when he noticed her again.

The new girl. Sawyer something. He'd heard the staff talking — the grandmother's secret, the daughter nobody knew about, dropped into the middle of debutante season like a stone into still water. She stood near one of the tall windows, slightly apart from the cluster of girls she'd arrived with, and she had this look on her face that Nick recognised immediately because he wore it himself sometimes, in private. The look of someone doing very careful mental arithmetic. Counting things. Filing things away.

She was watching the room the same way he watched it. Not admiring it. Studying it.

Most people who came to these events looked at the chandeliers and saw beauty. Nick looked at them and thought about who paid to have them cleaned and how much and whether it ever occurred to the people standing under them to wonder. He got the feeling Sawyer was the kind of person who wondered too.

He didn't know if that was a good thing yet.

She glanced over, and for a second their eyes met across the ballroom — her in a dress that looked like it belonged to someone else's life, him with a tray of drinks and a borrowed uniform and about a thousand things he wasn't saying. He didn't smile. She didn't either. But she didn't look away with that particular practiced blankness that most of the guests used on staff, the one that said you are a table, you are a lampshade, you are a feature of the room. She just looked at him like he was a person, which was, somehow, the most disorienting thing that had happened to him all evening.

He looked away first.

He was good at that. Walking away before things got complicated. It was practically a skill set at this point.

He moved toward the far end of the room, past a group of older men who barely paused their conversation as he refreshed their drinks. One of them was talking about his car. A new one — something imported, something expensive. Nick listened without looking like he was listening. He was good at that too.

Make and model, he thought. Keep going.

The drunk driver who had put Danny in that hospital bed — who had left him there, just driven away, like Danny was a dent in a bumper and not a person, not Nick's brother, not someone who laughed too loud and meant every word of it — was somewhere in this world. Nick had spent a long time believing it was a wide, anonymous world where people got away with things forever. He didn't believe that anymore. Not since he'd started working here. Not since he'd realised how small this world actually was underneath all the chandeliers and magnolias. How everyone knew everyone. How every secret had a room it lived in.

He just had to find the right room.

Nick straightened his tie, picked up the tray, and went back to work.

He could be patient. He'd had a lot of practice.

Xaden's being an ass again.

Not the dangerous kind — that one I'd know from fifty feet away by the set of his shoulders and the way everyone around him suddenly finds somewhere else to be. No, this is the specific kind of ass he becomes when he's worried and won't say so. He's talking to one of the new first years right now, some pale kid with shaking hands, and whatever he just said made the kid go a shade whiter.

I step in.

"Maybe ease up a little," I say to Xaden, who turns and looks at me like I've suggested he take up embroidery.

"I'm being helpful."

"You're being you," I say. "Which, to be fair to the kid, is a lot to deal with before breakfast."

The first year blinks between us. I give him a nod that hopefully communicates you're fine, he's always like this, I promise the dragon is friendlier. Xaden exhales through his nose, which for him counts as backing down. Small victories.

That's kind of the whole job, honestly. Not that anyone would describe it that way out loud.

People see Xaden and they understand, immediately and completely, what he is. The weight of it is right there on his neck, carved into his skin. A hundred and seven names that aren't actually names but might as well be. You look at him and you know: that person has decided something, and it will not be undecided.

People see me and they think: oh, his cousin. The one who grins.

Which — yes. Accurate. But also not the whole picture.

I think about the weapon drops. The missions Garrick and I are still arguing about in hushed voices at two in the morning because there has to be more we can do, there has to be, and Garrick hisses back that we're already doing everything we can, and I know he's right but knowing doesn't make it sit easier. We're marked. We were always going to be here. The question is just what you do with it.

Xaden decided a long time ago what he was going to do with it.

I decided I was going to make sure he didn't do it alone.

Imogen appears at my shoulder. She's got that particular expression she wears when she's about to do something I'm going to have to talk her out of.

"Don't," I say.

"I haven't said anything."

"You were going to."

She gives me a look. I give it back. We've had this conversation approximately four hundred times and it always ends the same way, which is with me having to be the reasonable one, which is a role I didn't audition for and yet here I am.

Cuir shifts on the field behind us, one green wing lifting slightly, and I feel the familiar pull of the bond — faint amusement, which is basically his default setting and honestly same. He's the most sensible one in any room he's in, which should tell you something about the rooms.

Xaden is watching Violet Sorrengail cross the yard.

He doesn't think I notice. He always thinks I don't notice, which after years of being the person beside him feels almost insulting.

I notice.

I notice the way he doesn't look away until she's completely gone. I notice that whatever he said to her two nights ago has him quieter than usual, which is saying something, because Xaden Riorson quiet is the kind of quiet that has mass to it. I notice that when someone makes a comment about her in his earshot, something in his jaw does a thing.

I'm not going to say anything about it. Not right now. He'd just look at me, and I'd have to spend twenty minutes pretending I didn't mean what I clearly meant, and it would be exhausting for both of us.

But I notice.

Later, at the cliffs, Violet lands and explains that she took a chance — that the wyvern might be drawn to her lightning. She says it like it's a small thing. Like chance is just something you calculate and then act on.

I grin.

"Chance panned out," I say.

Because it did. And sometimes that's the whole of it. You make the call, you take the jump, you trust the thing you can't fully see yet.

I've been watching Xaden do it for years.

Feels like she might be starting to, too.

There's a version of me that doesn't exist anymore.

She wore secondhand hoodies and ate cereal for dinner and thought that survival was a kind of winning. She kept her head down in the hallways at school because invisibility was a skill she'd spent years perfecting, and she was good at it — maybe one of the best at being nobody. She didn't ask for things. She didn't expect them. She told herself that wanting less was the same as needing less, and needing less was the same as being free.

I used to believe that.

I'm not sure I believe anything the same way anymore.

The problem with people like the Hawthornes — people with that much money, that much history, that much gravity — is that they pull everything toward them. Like a black hole dressed in cashmere. You don't fall into their orbit on purpose. You just look up one day and realize the ground beneath you has shifted, and somewhere between the riddles and the lies and the way Jameson Hawthorne looks at a puzzle like it owes him something, you've become a different kind of person. Or maybe you've become the person you always were, stripped down to the bone.

I'm still figuring out which one it is.

My mother left me a letter once.

Not a real one. Not the kind with an envelope and a stamp and handwriting that smelled like her perfume. It was in my head, the letter. The kind you write for yourself when you're twelve years old and someone you love disappears so completely that the only way to survive it is to invent explanations. I told myself she left because she had to. Because something bigger than her had demanded it. Because love sometimes looked like absence.

I believed that too, for a long time.

The Hawthorne estate teaches you things about stories. About the way people use them — to protect themselves, to protect others, to bury secrets so deep they become architecture. Every wall in Hawthorne House has something behind it. Every smile has a calculation underneath. I used to think that made people dishonest. Now I think it just makes them human. We are all building stories around the holes in ourselves.

My hole was shaped like a woman I barely remembered.

And then I started pulling threads, and the hole got bigger before it got smaller, and I learned that the truth about your own life can feel like a betrayal even when it's the kindest thing anyone has ever handed you. Truth doesn't owe you softness. That's something the Hawthornes understand deep in their blood. Tobias Hawthorne built an empire on that principle. He loved his grandsons by making them bleed for it.

I understand that now in a way I couldn't have, before.

People keep waiting for me to break.

I've noticed it — the way Grayson watches me sometimes with that careful, controlled steadiness of his, like he's braced for an explosion that hasn't arrived yet. The way Nash has a kind of quiet worry in his eyes that he doesn't bother disguising because Nash Hawthorne has never learned how to be anything other than exactly what he is. Even Xander, with his chaos and his engineering projects and his relentless, almost aggressive warmth, checks on me in his sideways Xander fashion, bumbling into rooms and asking if I want snacks with this very specific energy that means something else entirely.

They're waiting for me to shatter.

Here's the thing about being a girl who grew up the way I grew up — moving, always moving, apartments with thin walls, a mother who flickered in and out like bad reception: you learn what you're made of whether you want to or not. You get tested by the ordinary cruelties of everyday life, the small sustained pressures that don't make good stories but leave marks anyway. And you either bend until you break, or you bend until you figure out how far you can go without breaking, and then you file that information away like a survival manual.

I am not made of glass.

I am made of something that took a long time to harden, and it's not always pretty — it's not always kind — but it holds. I hold. Even when Jameson looks at me like I'm the most interesting problem he's ever wanted to solve. Even when I look back and feel that thing I refuse to name because naming it makes it real and real things can be taken from you. Even when the lawyers circle and the media speculates and the people who were born into this world look at me like I'm a variable in an equation they haven't quite solved yet.

I hold.

There's a question nobody asks out loud, but I hear it anyway: what do you want?

It hides in the negotiations, in the careful wordings of contracts, in the way certain people talk around me like I'm a complication to be managed. What does the girl want? What is she after? As if wanting things is inherently suspicious. As if the only clean motive is no motive at all.

I've asked myself that question more times than I can count, lying awake in rooms that are too large and too quiet and too full of someone else's history. What do I want? I want to understand the shape of my own life. I want to know if the story I was handed is the true one or just the one that was easiest to tell. I want to stop carrying things that were never mine to carry and start putting down roots somewhere that isn't temporary, isn't just the next place on the way to somewhere else.

I want to matter.

Not in the Hawthorne way — not in the millions of dollars and carved mahogany and legacy-that-echoes-down-generations way. I don't need to be that kind of important. I just want to be someone who leaves a mark. Who passed through this world and made it slightly different by being here. Who loved people fiercely enough that they felt it. Who didn't let fear do all her deciding for her.

That's what I'm fighting for, when it comes down to it.

Not the inheritance. Not the estate. Not the answers to riddles that Tobias Hawthorne scattered across his life like breadcrumbs for players he chose before they knew they were playing. Those are just the vehicle. The game is the game, and I am good at it — better than I expected, better than I have any comfortable explanation for — but winning puzzles was never the point.

The point is this: I want to find out who I am when nobody is watching. When the stakes aren't stacked so high I can't breathe. When I can just be Lyra — whoever that is, whatever shape she turns out to have — without every answer she finds opening into three more questions.

The version of me that doesn't exist anymore? She thought wanting nothing was strength.

She was wrong.

Wanting things is the whole point. Wanting things, and being brave enough to reach for them anyway, even when you've been taught that reaching is how you get hurt. That's not weakness. That's the most defiant thing a person like me can do.

So I reach.

And I hold.

And I keep pulling threads.

People think lying is hard. They think it costs something — a twinge of guilt, a skip in the heartbeat, a flicker behind the eyes. They think the truth wants out, that it aches to be spoken.

Those people have never had to survive.

I learned to lie before I learned to read. I learned it the way other kids learn to ride bikes — falling, falling, and then one day, not falling. I learned it in a room that smelled like incense and certainty, surrounded by people who believed every word that came out of a nine-year-old girl's mouth because she told them God spoke to her in her sleep. I gave them visions. I gave them purpose. And they gave me something I hadn't had before: safety, of a kind.

Twisted safety. Borrowed safety. But still.

My name is Lia. Not Sadie. I decided that a long time ago, on a night when the air outside smelled like rain and diesel and away, and I walked into it and didn't look back. Sadie belonged to that place. Sadie was a girl who had no choices. I made Lia out of nothing — out of sheer nerve and necessity — and that makes her more mine than anything else has ever been.

Here's what the others don't know about being a human lie detector: it's lonely.

Every single conversation is a dissection. I watch the micro-expressions flicker across a face before the person even knows they're feeling something. I hear the breath catch, the pitch shift, the half-second delay that means someone is choosing their words too carefully. I know, I always know — and there is nobody in the world who doesn't lie, at least a little, at least sometimes.

Sloane comes closest. Sloane tells you a fact about the tensile strength of spider silk when she means I'm scared, and that is technically not a lie, so I let her have it. I would let Sloane have anything.

Dean lies by omission, mostly. He folds everything difficult into silence and calls it stoicism. I invented that move; I can recognize it. We don't talk about it. We don't need to.

Michael. Michael is the interesting one, because Michael lies the way I do — fluently, habitually, as reflex rather than intent — and yet somehow I can always read him anyway. Maybe because I know what it looks like from the inside. Two mirrors facing each other. Infinite, dizzying, and ultimately going nowhere.

And Cassie—

I'm still deciding about Cassie. She reads people the way I read lies, and she doesn't even realize how much she sees. That's the dangerous kind of observant. The kind you can't perform for.

I won't say I trust her. Trust is a word I treat like a sharp object — carefully, and never around people who haven't earned it.

But I don't not trust her. Which, for me, is practically a declaration of love.

The FBI thinks they found us, the Naturals. They think they recruited us, shaped us, gave us purpose. They have files with our names on them, our abilities catalogued in neat bullet points, our traumas summarized in clinical language that somehow makes them sound manageable.

They don't understand that we were already this. That we were made this, by things that happened before they found us. I was a lie detector before I was a person. I was a survivor before I was anything else.

They gave me a room in a house and a case file and the closest thing to a family I've ever let myself have. I'm not ungrateful.

But I know the difference between what people offer and what they mean. I always do.

My name is Lia Zhang. I can tell when you're lying.

And I have never, not once in my life, told you everything that's true.

I don't sleep the way other people sleep.

Most people close their eyes and the world goes quiet. For me, quiet is just another word for loud. The silence fills up fast — with profiles, with patterns, with the kind of thoughts that don't belong to me but live in me anyway. My father's voice. The way a killer thinks. The architecture of a mind built for destruction.

I know it too well.

That's the thing nobody tells you about being a Natural. It's not a gift. It's a frequency you can't turn off.

Cassie is asleep across the hall. I know because the light under her door went dark forty minutes ago and she hasn't moved since — no creaking floorboards, no 2 AM trips to the kitchen the way she does when a case gets under her skin. Tonight she's still. Tonight, for once, the case isn't eating her alive.

I'm glad.

I'm also watching the door like something's going to come through it.

Old habit. Survival instinct dressed up as paranoia — or maybe paranoia dressed up as survival instinct. With me it's hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. My therapist would have something to say about that. I don't have a therapist. I have a program, a handler, and a girl who looks at me like I'm worth something, which is somehow more terrifying than either of the other two.

I sit on the edge of my bed and press the heels of my hands into my eyes.

The unsub from the last case is still in my head. That's how it works — I climb inside and then the climb back out takes longer than it should. You spend enough time mapping the psychology of someone who hurts people and eventually you start checking yourself for the same fault lines. Same impulses. Same dark geometry.

My father has my eyes.

I've known that since I was nine years old and someone thought it was a compliment.

The floorboard in the hallway shifts. One creak, then nothing. I know that pattern — three steps from Cassie's door, weight distributed slightly to the left. She does it when she's trying not to wake anyone.

She's not very good at it.

She never is.

A soft knock. Two taps.

"You're not asleep," she says through the door. Not a question. She already knows. That's the thing about Cassie Hobbes — she profiles without meaning to, reads a room without trying, and half the time she figures me out before I've figured out myself. It should bother me more than it does.

"Come in," I say.

She opens the door and leans against the frame, arms crossed, hair still messy from almost-sleep. She's looking at me the way she does sometimes — like she's solving something. Like I'm a puzzle she already has all the pieces to but keeps checking anyway, just to be sure.

"Bad night?" she asks.

I consider lying. It would be easy. I'm good at distance — I've been practicing it my whole life, built walls so clean and high that most people don't even realize they're on the outside. But Cassie's already on the inside. I let her in and I don't entirely know when it happened, and some nights that fact alone is the most disorienting thing in the room.

"Thinking," I say.

"About the case?"

"About after the case."

She's quiet for a moment. That's something I've always respected about her — she doesn't rush to fill silence. Most people are afraid of it. Cassie just waits, lets it sit, lets it mean something.

"He's not you," she says finally.

She doesn't say my father's name. She never does, not unless she has to. Like she knows it costs something.

"I know that."

"Do you?"

I look at her. Really look — the way I do when I'm not profiling, not analyzing, not picking apart behavior and motive and tells. Just looking. There's a difference and she's one of the only reasons I know what it feels like.

"Some days more than others," I say honestly.

She crosses the room and sits beside me on the edge of the bed, close enough that her shoulder presses against mine. She doesn't say anything else. She doesn't try to fix it or reframe it or talk me down from something I'm not standing on. She just stays.

That's the thing about her that I can never quite profile my way around.

She stays.

I've built every wall I own out of the certainty that people don't. My mother didn't. The families of my father's victims couldn't look at me without flinching. Even the program — the program takes and uses and deploys, it doesn't stay. Not really.

But Cassie does.

I don't tell her that. I don't have the words for it yet, or maybe I have too many and none of them feel right. Instead I lean back slightly, just enough that the tension in my shoulders loosens a fraction.

Outside, the night is still.

"Go back to sleep," I tell her.

"In a minute," she says.

She won't. We both know it. We'll sit here until the dark gets thin at the edges and the birds start up and the world remembers it's supposed to keep moving. We've done it before.

My father is in my blood and my eyes and the part of my brain that understands monsters better than it should.

But this — right here — is mine.

And for once, I don't profile it.

I just let it be.

They actually did it. They put me in a cage like some common criminal, like I'm not a Hawthorne. Like I didn't spend my entire life learning to outsmart people exactly like the ones who put me here.

The cell is small. Gray. Predictable. Everything I'm not.

I'm innocent. That should matter, but it doesn't. Not to them. Not to the system that's decided I'm guilty before the trial even begins. They think they have me cornered with their "evidence" and their smug faces. They think a Hawthorne can be broken by concrete walls and steel bars.

They're wrong.

I've already started planning. Three days. That's all I need. Seventy-two hours and I'll be gone, and they'll be left wondering how they ever thought they could hold me. Grandfather didn't raise us to accept defeat. He raised us to win, no matter the odds, no matter the game.

The guard who brought me dinner has a tell - he checks his watch every seventeen minutes. Creature of habit. That's exploitable. The window in the rec room has a loose bolt on the left side. I noticed it during my one hour of "freedom" today. No one else sees these things. But I do. I always do.

Avery would tell me to wait for the lawyers. To trust the system. But Avery doesn't understand - sometimes the system is rigged, and the only way to win is to flip the board entirely.

Three days. I can taste freedom already.

Spent most of today observing. Watching. Learning the patterns. Prisons run on routine, and routine is just another word for weakness.

Morning count: 6:47 AM exactly. Breakfast: 7:15. Rec time: 2:00-3:00 PM. Dinner: 5:30. Lights out: 10:00 PM.

But here's what they don't account for - between 3:47 and 4:02 AM, there's a shift change. Fifteen minutes where the guard rotation creates a blind spot near the east corridor. Fifteen minutes is an eternity when you know how to use it.

I've been friendly. Charming, even. The other inmates think I'm just another rich kid who doesn't belong here. They're half right. I don't belong here, but not because I'm soft. Because I'm already ten steps ahead of everyone in this building.

Made contact with someone on the outside today. Managed to slip a note during visitor processing - don't ask me how, magicians never reveal their secrets. By tomorrow night, I'll have what I need waiting for me on the other side of these walls.

My cellmate asked me today if I was scared. I laughed. Fear is for people who don't have a plan. I have three.

One more day locked up. Then I disappear.

Tonight.

The bolt comes loose at 3:49 AM—two minutes behind schedule. I lower it carefully to the tile so it doesn’t clatter. No noise. No hesitation. The corridor beyond the rec room window is silent; the blind spot opens exactly as predicted. I slip through the window feet first, hang for a breath, then drop. The impact jolts up my legs, but I roll with it and rise smoothly.

No alarms. No shouting.

Clean.

Three days of counting footsteps. Three days of mapping routines. Three days of pretending to be cornered.

Two blocks south, the car waits beneath a flickering streetlamp. Black sedan. Forgettable. I crouch beside the front left tire and reach underneath. The keys are there, exactly where they’re supposed to be.

I slide into the driver’s seat and shut the door softly. Cold leather. Faint gasoline.

Freedom.

I let myself feel it for half a second.

Then the dashboard flickers.

Static streaks across the screen even though the engine isn’t on. The display resolves into grainy black-and-white footage: an interrogation room. Metal table. One chair occupied.

Avery.

The timestamp reads 3:36 AM. Thirteen minutes ago.

A distorted voice fills the car. “You always did love an audience, Jameson.”

My grip tightens on the steering wheel as a file slides across the table toward her. My name is printed across the tab.

“You break out,” the voice continues calmly, “and she takes your place.”

The feed switches to my cell—empty. Guards rushing in. Alarms blaring.

They let me escape.

This wasn’t a blind spot.

It was bait.

The car doors lock automatically with a sharp click. The screen goes black, then one word appears:

DRIVE.

A countdown flashes beneath it. 02:00.

“If you’re not across state lines,” the voice says smoothly, “we file the charges. Permanently.”

Against her.

I stare at the clock. At the road ahead. At the live feed of Avery sitting perfectly still, chin lifted. She doesn’t look afraid.

She looks calculating.

Her eyes flick toward the camera.

And then—almost imperceptibly—she shakes her head.

Not panic.

A signal.

Too clean. Too precise.

Hawthornes don’t get trapped.

We get tested.

My lips curve slowly. They think this is about ego. They think I’d run. They don’t understand.

I start the engine. The countdown drops to 01:32.

And I shift into reverse.

The tires screech as I spin the wheel and head back toward the prison—toward the floodlights, toward the trap.

Sirens ignite as I cross the yard. Floodlights snap on. Guards swarm.

“On the ground!”

I lift my hands slowly.

Because this was always the move.

They drag me back inside, loud and chaotic. Performance matters. They shove me into an interrogation room—metal table, two chairs. One already occupied.

Avery doesn’t look surprised.

She looks annoyed.

“You’re late,” she says calmly.

The man orchestrating this little experiment steps forward from the shadows. Expensive suit. Tight smile.

“You think this is amusing?” he asks.

I glance at Avery. She gives the smallest nod.

That’s all I need.

“You wanted to see if I’d run,” I say lightly. “If I’d sacrifice her.”

“And you failed,” he replies.

“Did I?”

Avery reaches into her sleeve and places a flash drive on the table. “You should really update your cybersecurity,” she says coolly. “Your internal servers were embarrassingly easy to access.”

The screen behind him flickers on.

Bank transfers. Fabricated evidence. Bribes. Every piece of data that put me in that cell—timestamped, backed up, traceable.

“You framed the wrong person,” I say softly.

He lunges for the flash drive.

Too late.

The door behind him opens. Federal agents step inside, badges raised.

“You planned this,” he breathes.

Avery stands. “No,” she says evenly.

I smile.

“We solved it.”

They drag him away. The alarms cut off. Silence settles.

Avery turns to me. “You were actually going to leave.”

“Temporarily.”

“You hesitated.”

“Two full seconds.”

She exhales, somewhere between frustrated and relieved. “You scared me.”

There it is—the crack in her voice.

“They wanted to see if I’d choose myself,” I murmur.

“And?”

I meet her eyes.

“They don’t understand the rules.”

A pause.

Then she smiles.

Across the hall, my cell door stands open, unoccupied, like it never held me at all.

Three days in a cage. Three days too many.

They thought they built a prison.

They built a puzzle.

And Hawthornes don’t lose.