Chapter 15 The Whole Truth

• King Edmund was crossing the courtyard when the gates opened, an old man's early morning habit he had never broken even in grief, and for a moment he simply stood there, certain his grief had finally overcome him in a cruel dream conjured by too many sleepless nights, because the two women riding through them could not possibly be his daughter and the girl he had once sentenced to death in the same breath, could not possibly be standing in his own courtyard alive and whole after everything the years had told him to believe about both of them.
• "Ivy," he choked out, and then she was off her horse and in his arms, sobbing into his shoulder the way she had not allowed herself to since she was a small child, her weak wolf finally, quietly, letting itself be held after years of flinching from every touch, her father's arms closing around her with a fierceness that told her, before he said a single word, that some part of him had never stopped waiting for this.
• Julian came around the corner at a dead run, hair disheveled from sleep, his own wolf blazing gold behind his eyes, drawn by a pull in his chest he had chased down the hallway before his mind had even finished understanding what it meant, and stopped dead at the sight of Aria standing quietly by the gate, alive, whole, older by five years but unmistakably, impossibly her, watching him with an expression he could not yet let himself believe.