Three years he had rotted in a cell for a crime he didn't commit, and this was his welcome home, a clipboard and a pen and a cousin who looked at him like he was an insect she wanted to step on."Arya can't even face me herself, she sent her cousin to end our marriage in a parking lot?"The rear door opened, and Arya stepped out with the kind of grace that made the air around her seem to rearrange itself. Tailored dress, hair pinned back, the posture of a woman who had spent three years learning how to carry authority in her spine. She was beautiful the way a blade is beautiful, and Eddard hated that he noticed it even now, even with the divorce papers still warm in Martha's hands.But her eyes wouldn't stay on his, and that told him everything the paperwork hadn't."Eddard, this isn't a joke," Arya said in a voice that was careful and measured and practiced, like she'd rehearsed this conversation in a mirror until all the guilt was smoothed out of it. "I need you to understand that

The villa looked the way abandoned things always look, like something that had been holding its breath for three years and had forgotten how to exhale. Dust covered the windowsills in a fine gray layer, and the garden that Eddard's mother had once tended with such careful hands had gone wild with weeds that pushed through the stone path like they were trying to reclaim the place for nature. The porch light was dead, the mailbox was rusted shut, and the front door stuck when he turned the key because the wood had swollen in its frame from seasons of rain that nobody had been there to wipe away.Eddard stood in the doorway and let it all settle over him, the silence of the house mixing with memories that hit harder than he expected. His father reading at the kitchen table, his mother humming while she cooked, the sound of their laughter moving through rooms that now held nothing but stale air and dust. He had fought wars inside a prison, learned skills that could topple governments,

The lead bodyguard didn't even slow down. His open palm connected with the side of Luigi's face with a crack that echoed through the foyer like a gunshot, and Luigi's head snapped sideways so hard his entire body followed, spinning him halfway around before his legs gave out and he staggered into the wall with his hand pressed against his cheek and his eyes swimming with confusion because nothing in his pampered life had prepared him for the simple reality of being hit by someone who knew how to hit."You, you hit me?" Luigi's voice came out thick and slurred, and he was blinking rapidly like a man trying to see through water. "I'll kill you. I'll kill every single one of you, I'll kill your families, I'll burn your houses down, I'll make sure every person you've ever loved suffers for this."Agatha's expression, which had been merely cold, turned into something that belonged in a freezer. Her grandfather, the man she loved more than anyone alive, was lying in a hospital bed right now

The lead doctor had been practicing medicine for nineteen years, and in all that time he had dealt with grieving mothers, angry fathers, patients who threw bedpans at his head, and one memorable incident involving a senator's wife and a smuggled Chihuahua, but Gwen Clarke was quickly climbing toward the top of his list of people he never wanted to see again."Ma'am, I've explained the situation to you three times now, and the answer has not changed," he said with the strained patience of a man who could feel his blood pressure climbing with each passing minute. "The VIP wards are fully reserved and there is nothing I can do to alter that arrangement.""Then un-reserve them," Gwen shrieked, and several patients in nearby rooms pressed their call buttons just to make sure a nurse was nearby in case whatever was happening in the hallway came closer. "My son is lying on a gurney with a broMarcus leg and you're telling me he has to share a room with common people who probably can't even af

So Eddard had a woman. Had he met her in prison? Had she been waiting for him on the outside, counting the days until his release like Arya should have been counting but wasn't?Something hot and unwelcome stirred in Arya's chest, and it took her a moment to recognize it as jealousy. Which was absurd. She had just divorced the man. She had handed him papers and watched him sign and felt nothing but relief when he walked away. She didn't want him. She didn't love him. She had made peace with that years ago, somewhere around the second anniversary of his incarceration, when the visits became obligations and the phone calls became chores and the letters became something she answered on the first of every month because she had put it on her calendar and her calendar never forgot anything.She didn't want Eddard Collins.But the idea of someone else wanting him, of someone else having him, of Eddard laughing with another woman in the house that should have been hers by marriage if not by l