CHAPTER SIX

MADAME DUVAL’S POV

I left Divine’s room with my thoughts churning, faster than they’d moved in years. Sixteen years. Could it really be? After all this time, had a piece of my sister finally found its way back to me, delivered by an accident of all things, by a hospital bed and a stranger’s shift schedule?

I walked through the villa without really seeing the staff who greeted me on my way, bowing their heads as I passed the way they always did, though tonight I barely registered the gesture. My feet carried me straight to my chambers on instinct, the long hallway feeling both longer and shorter than usual. The hidden panel slid open with a soft click at my touch, and the dark room wrapped around me like something familiar, something I hadn’t let myself sit inside for a long while. On the wall, the one photograph waited, exactly where it always waited — Francesca, long brown hair framing eyes the color of rich earth, caught mid-laugh at something long since forgotten by everyone but me. My sister.

The memories came back fast, unspooling faster than I could brace for them.

My beautiful sister. The pregnancy that made her abandon everything and run, throwing away a birthright most of us would have killed for without a second thought.

I remembered the words of the late priestess she was meant to take the mantle from, words I’d carried around in my chest like a stone for sixteen years: “She will return years from now. The battle against the evil forces will be great. She is the only one who can save us.”

I understood now what the woman had meant, understood it in a way I hadn’t been able to when Francesca was still alive to hear it herself. She hadn’t been talking about Francesca at all. She’d been talking about a piece of her. Her daughter.

After sixteen years of waiting, of watching and hoping and doing what I’d had to do to keep our place secure in the meantime, maybe the supernatural world actually stood a chance against the darkness still coming for all of us.

I walked to the photograph and touched it softly, my fingers tracing the curve of her jaw through the glass.

“If there’s a chance she’s really yours — my niece — I promise to give everything I have to finish the fight you couldn’t.” The words came out rougher than I intended, catching on something old.

“I’m so sorry I couldn’t protect either of you, when I had the chance.” That part I said quieter still, almost too quiet to count as speech at all.

I stood there a moment longer, looking at her face, letting myself feel the weight of it before I put it away again the way I always did. Then I noticed it — the necklace around her photographed throat, glowing faintly in the dim room. Not bright. Just enough to notice, if you already knew to look.

I smiled, something sharp and complicated moving behind it. Hope wasn’t lost after all. My sister was back, in the only way she ever could be now. Back to reclaim what was hers, whether the girl herself understood that yet or not.

I lowered myself into the chair across from the photograph, the leather cold even through the weight of my robe, and let myself remember the version of my sister I rarely allowed myself to picture — not the girl in the photograph, laughing, careless, but the woman who stood in the doorway of this very villa the night she left it for good, chin up, eyes wet but refusing to fall apart in front of me. She’d been carrying a duffel bag stuffed too full to zip properly, and she hadn’t asked me to come with her, hadn’t asked me for anything at all, which had somehow hurt worse than if she had.

Our parents had been gone three years by then, and I’d already learned what it cost to keep the pack together without them — favors traded in rooms nobody else was allowed into, promises made to powers I didn’t fully understand the shape of until it was too late to take them back. Francesca had never known the extent of what I’d done to hold our family’s place at the top of this world. She’d looked at me the night she left like she already suspected, like some part of her recognized the cost sitting on me even without proof, and she’d chosen to walk away from all of it instead of asking me to explain.

“You’re going to lose yourself in this place,” she’d told me, voice steady even as her eyes weren’t. “I won’t.”

I hadn’t stopped her. I told myself at the time it was respect for her choice, for the love she’d found that our world would never have accepted from her, not from a priestess destined for a throne of her own. The truth, if I was being honest with myself in the quiet of this room the way I rarely allowed, was that I’d been relieved. Relieved she was choosing her own ruin instead of watching me build mine in front of her.

I hadn’t seen her again until the day I heard she’d died in the accident and, sixteen years too late, understood at last what it meant that the child in the back seat had walked away without a scratch to show for it. A soft knock sounded at the door before I could sink any further into the memory, and I straightened my spine on reflex, sixteen years of practice smoothing my face back into something no member of my staff would ever be permitted to read.

“Enter.”

One of the younger staff girls slipped in, eyes downcast, a folded note balanced on a small silver tray. “A message, Madam. From the eastern court.”

I took it without a word, dismissing her with a glance, and waited until the door had clicked shut again before I broke the seal. The handwriting inside was cramped, careful, the kind that came from someone who’d learned long ago that carelessness in this world got people killed. I read it twice before I let myself react, and when I finally did, the smile that had lived on my face a moment ago was already gone, replaced by something colder, more familiar.

They knew already. Somehow, impossibly, word had already reached the dragon court that a girl matching an old, half-forgotten description had turned up in a human hospital bed. Sixteen years of careful silence, and it had taken less than a day to start unraveling.

I folded the note back along its original creases and pressed it flat against my palm, feeling the weight of everything I still had to do to keep this girl — my niece, my sister’s whole legacy — safely inside these walls before anyone with worse intentions than mine got to her first.