Seron stood frozen, staring at the two bodies on the floor, the woman who had raised him without ever truly being his mother, and the man who had orchestrated his entire life like pieces on a board, both gone in the span of thirty seconds, taking with them the only answers Seron had ever had about who he actually was.
Acacia was the first to move, stepping toward him slowly, carefully, like approaching the edge of something that might still collapse further.
"Seron," she said quietly.
He didn't answer. He was still staring down at Violet's body, at the strange, permanent stillness of a face that had never once, in his entire life, looked anything but certain.
Somewhere out there, if Wayne had been telling the truth, was a child who shared his blood and none of his history, a stranger wearing the life that should have been his.
And he had absolutely no idea, standing in a room full of bodies and betrayal, where he would even begin to look.
