Aveline shivered.
Someone who could not identify faces.
That explained Lucien far too well. Suddenly, the way he had looked at her made a chilling kind of sense. He had not looked at her as though he knew her. He had looked at her as though she had stirred the outline of someone he had lost long ago, someone whose face time had stolen from him but whose absence still lived somewhere deep inside him.
And with that realization came another thought, quieter but sharper.
Could she use him?
Aveline's gaze drifted toward the direction of the Archduke's laboratory, and her mind began moving faster than her fear. Those stones. That place. That madness wrapped in research and secrets. If she could get close to him, she might learn far more there than she ever would while sitting dutifully in class and listening to teachers recite history as though it were something dead and harmless.
Maybe she could finally understand why she saw the stones differently from everyone else.
