Aria hadn't meant to go.She'd told herself for three days she wouldn't, that watching from the back row of a crowd she had no right to sit in would only make the guilt worse, not better. She'd gone anyway, slipping into the very last tier where the lighting rigs threw everything into shadow, because some stubborn, punishing part of her needed to see it. Needed proof, she supposed, that the boy she'd helped nearly kill was still standing, still whole, still capable of winning something in front of people who used to laugh at his name.He'd won. Of course he'd won. She'd known he would before the match even started, the way you know rain is coming from the particular color of a sky, and knowing it hadn't made watching it happen any easier.The crowd roared around her, and she sat very still in the middle of it, hands pressed together hard enough to hurt.*Two months and you're already reading me better than people I've fought for years,* Coraline Petrov had said, loud enough to carry,

Two more, plus Voss, plus whoever else the warehouse might be hiding in its stacked shadows. Noah did the math instantly, the same cold arithmetic that used to terrify him and now, strangely, steadied him instead.*Four against two. Exits covered. No cameras, no witnesses, nobody coming.*It was his own ambush, wearing a different building. Different faces, different reasons, the same basic architecture of a trap he'd once walked into completely blind. He almost laughed at the symmetry of it, except laughing wasn't an option with two of Voss's men currently deciding how to close the last few feet of distance between them.The recognition landed less like fear and more like familiarity, an old room he'd learned the exact shape of the hard way. He knew what came next in a scene like this. He'd lived the version where he didn't see it coming, where the wards were cut and the cameras were dead and nobody stepped in until it was too late. This time the wards weren't cut. This time somebody

Noah didn't sleep.He lay on Selene's spare couch with his eyes open to the dark, listening to the house settle around him, to Adrian's restless turning somewhere down the hall, to Selene's careful, deliberate silence that he'd come to understand meant she was awake too and simply didn't want either of them to know it. Three months of fragments and he'd learned at least that much … grief in this house didn't announce itself. It just sat very still and waited to be noticed.Around two in the morning, he gave up pretending.The fragment sat where Selene had left it, wrapped in a scrap of cloth on the kitchen counter, dark and quiet in the dim light from the stove clock. He knew, distantly, that touching it twice might not be wise. Nobody had told him that outright. Nobody had told him much of anything about the actual rules these things followed. But some small, aching part of him needed to see her again, needed it the way you need water after a long day, and he'd stopped being the kind

"Her brother," Adrian said finally, so quietly Noah almost missed it under the sound of the bird still calling outside. "I was her brother. Am. Was. I've never settled on the right tense for it."Noah sat down across from him slowly, legs suddenly unreliable. The word landed strange in his mouth, even unspoken, too large for the small kitchen, too large for a morning that had started with nothing more than a half-remembered lullaby. "You're my uncle.""Yes.""You've been my uncle this entire time. Four years of raising me, three years of watching me get humiliated at that academy, and you let me believe you were some groundskeeper who took pity on an orphan because nobody else would.""I let the whole world believe that." Adrian's voice stayed low, steady, the careful control of a man who'd rehearsed this confession so many times in his head that saying it out loud felt almost unreal. "Not just you. I built an entire life around that lie, Noah. Kaelen. Whatever name fits best right no

Corvin found him three nights later, in the same patch of shadow behind the equipment shed where he'd first given Noah the name that turned out to mean everything."You're harder to catch alone these days," Corvin said, by way of greeting, voice rough with exertion he was clearly trying to hide. "Popular men draw crowds even when they're trying not to.""I'm not popular. I just keep winning things.""At Blackfang, those tend to be the same condition." Corvin studied him in the dim light, longer than the comment warranted, the particular careful scrutiny of a man checking for cracks in a structure he'd helped build. "You look different than you did the last time we spoke in this shed.""A lot's happened since then.""Tell me."Noah hesitated, old habit warring with the exhaustion of carrying too many secrets alone. He thought of the match two nights ago, Corvin's hand pressed flat over his heart in the stands, the single salute that had carried more weight than words would have managed