"You've never spoken like this before," she said.
"I know."
"The Kraven who left this family—" She stopped. Started again more carefully. "You didn't think this way. You didn't think about consequences and costs and what lessons other people were learning from your behavior. You acted and you expected the world to accommodate it."
Julian said nothing.
"What happened to you in Ezakael," she said.
It was the same question Vanessa had asked, in different words, from a different angle. Julian had been expecting it and had prepared a version of the same answer.
"I had a great deal of time to think," he said. "And very few distractions that mattered."
Olivia looked at him steadily. "That's not an answer."
"It's an honest part of one," he said.
She was quiet for a moment, and in the silence she was trying to compare two versions of the same person and finding the comparison genuinely difficult.
