Ten days.
That was all it took.
Ten days of waking up too early, of staring at the ceiling until the pale morning light bled through the curtains and burned her eyes. Ten days of swallowing black coffee without tasting it, of letting the scalding heat slide down her throat as if pain in one place could numb the ache in another.
Ten days of Seleyena's voice playing on repeat inside her skull.
'He is… mine.'
Thalia's jaw tightened.
She stood in the corridor now — long, marble-floored, lined with enormous potted palms that cast spindly shadows across the polished ground. The air smelled of fresh-cut flowers and old money, of wood polish and ambition. Climate-controlled and silent except for the distant murmur of voices on the other side of the towering door at the corridor's end.
Two guards flanked it.
They saw her approach.
Without a word, both men dipped their heads in a slow, deliberate bow.
