Chapter 203

• Deric
• The morning air was too dry, too cold, yet somehow it felt like it wasn’t cold enough. I couldn’t shake the heat of everything that had happened, the revelations climbing at my chest. Elvira. My sister. The words echoed in my head as if they didn’t belong, as if some part of me would reject them outright, but the truth was stubborn. It was real. She was mine, in a way I had never allowed myself to understand before, and the weight of that was pressing me down like a tide I couldn’t fight.
• I paced the floor of my room in the Morrien tower, the creak of the old wood beneath my boots louder than it should have been. Light streamed through the narrow windows, slanting across my fists, knuckles white as I clenched them. I’d seen her yesterday and it had been a mixture of shock, fear, and something softer—relief, maybe. Relief that the truth was out, though I knew it would rip through both our lives in ways we couldn’t yet anticipate.