ROWAN
I had poured two cups of coffee before I caught myself.
I stood there looking at the second one for a moment, at the steam rising off it, and then I set it on the windowsill and turned away from it and sat back down on the edge of my bed.
The light had already shifted from grey to pale gold outside. I had no memory of watching it change.
I kept coming back to the courtyard. To her face when I told her about the bloodline, about what Corvin had been doing with her from the beginning, watching the exact moment she understood all of it at once. She did not cry. She did not fall apart or throw anything or demand to know why I had taken so long to tell her. She just stood there and absorbed it, and I watched her do that and felt the tightness I had been carrying for weeks shift in a way I had not prepared for and could not put back.
Tonight she would be bound to my father.
I had been pressing on that all night the way you pressed a bruise to confirm it still hurt.
