She woke to the artificial buzz of fluorescent lights and the muffled sound of voices from the waiting room.

  She let herself surface slowly, the way she had learned to do in the years when waking too quickly meant finding Lucien watching her — sitting in the velvet chair beside the bed, legs crossed, patient as a spider at the center of its web.

  She kept her breathing even. She kept her eyes closed.

  “It appears our little emotional parasite hasn’t been completely honest with us.”

  Peter’s voice, dripping moreso with quiet intrigue than the suspicion she knew she deserved.

  “So Lucien’s wife is dangerous. And a liar.” Malia’s voice. Direct and flat, with no apology tucked inside it. “Go figure.”

  “I know she’s dangerous. Tell me how she lied.”

  Scott. She recognized the quiet weight of authority in his voice even now, having only just met him. There was something in it that was different from Lucien’s authority — from the cold, architectural certainty with which Lucien issued commands. Scott sounded like someone who had earned the right to be listened to rather than someone who had simply decided he deserved to be obeyed.

  “She was Lucien’s wife, in every sense of the word. That part is true. She also has every reason to fear and loathe him as much as we do. I mean, the level of manipulation and betrayal imposed on her rivals that of Kate Argent.”

  Eliza sensed a shift in the air, like it had grown heavier with memories someone had tried to erase.

  “But she’s not just a witch. Neither is he.” Peter paused before adding with a flourish: “They were descended from the Fae.”

  Silence. Eliza listened to the lights above her and held her breath for three seconds before someone spoke.

  “What does that mean?” Malia again.

  “I’ve heard rumors.” It was Deaton who spoke this time. “The Fae were a magical race of creatures that hunters ran extinct centuries ago. Interesting creatures. Powerful. Mischievous.”

  “Unreasonably attractive,” Peter added.

  “Their powers are mostly tied to life, nature, dreams, and illusions,” Deaton continued. “Legend has it, a number of witch bloodlines interbred with the fae, allowing their powers to survive their extinction. If the Nox and Bloodworth lines are descended from the fae, it explains why both Lucien and Eliza have such rare, innate gifts. They’re unusual, even for witches.”

  “Why didn’t she tell us?” Scott again. He didn’t sound angry — but he sounded alarmed.

  Eliza opened her eyes and tore herself off the examination table. The door creaked as she pulled it open.

  They all turned when she appeared in the doorway of the waiting room. Scott. Malia. Deaton behind the front desk. Derek, standing slightly apart from the others near the wall, arms crossed, watching her with an expression that gave away very little except that he was watching carefully. And Peter, whose mouth curved the way a person’s does when they’ve been caught discussing someone and feel no particular shame about it.

  Eliza looked at Scott.

  “Maybe you’re not the only ones who need for trust to be earned,” she said.

  She looked around the room at each of them in turn, unhurried, meeting every set of eyes until the silence had made its point.

  “The Fae ancestry explains the gifts — which I didn’t lie about, by the way,” she continued, her voice level. “Both mine and Lucien’s. But it also means that Lucien is significantly more dangerous than a dark witch with an army. The gifts that run in our bloodlines aren’t just inherited — they compound. Every generation they become something older and stranger and harder to counter.” She paused. “I didn’t tell you because I didn’t know whether you’d try to help me or whether you’d decide to put me down before Lucien could use me. I’m still not entirely certain which it will be.”

  “That’s fair,” Scott said quietly. He didn’t flinch from it, which she hadn’t expected.

  “There were conversations…” Malia admitted.

  Peter tilted his head, studying her the way someone studies an equation they find genuinely interesting. “And the Fae side of you — the life force absorption. Resonance drain. You’ve been using it subconsciously since you arrived, haven’t you? Feeding off the emotional residue in every room you walk into.”

  “I’ve been doing it since I was sixteen,” she admitted quietly. “I don’t always know I’m doing it. I try not to. It got worse after —“ She stopped. Reconsidered. “After the trance. Like something that had been dammed up for eight years came loose all at once and still hasn’t found its banks.”

  She didn’t look at Derek when she said it. She was careful not to.

  “Her aura is deeply unstable,” Deaton said, not unkindly, as though he were confirming something he had already suspected and was only now comfortable saying aloud. “Which is consistent with years of forced magical suppression followed by a sudden and violent release. The concern, beyond the fae ancestry, is the ring.” He folded his hands on the desk in that deliberate way of his. “If it’s still bound to her — and by all appearances it is — then Lucien may still have access to her. A tether of that kind doesn’t need proximity to function. It predates the trance. It may predate almost everything else.”

  “So he could be watching through her right now,” Malia said. Not a question.

  “It’s possible. Or simply listening.”

  “He already knows.” Eliza looked at Deaton directly. “Whatever you’re afraid of — he knows. In the castle, he knew he was losing his hold on me. I suspect he knows I was in London. I don’t know if he knows I’m here, but if Jackson was telling the truth about this pack and the things you’ve done, then I suspect he knows about you, too.”

  “We expected him to know about us,” Peter admitted, examining his claws with a bored expression. “We’re kind of a big deal in the supernatural world.”

  “We were talking about the ring, Peter,” Scott redirected.

  Eliza lifted her left hand, the ring catching the flat fluorescent light, dark metal sitting flush against her finger the way it always had, seamless and permanent as scar tissue. “This manifested on my finger the night he killed everyone I had ever loved,” she said. “He called it a gift.”

  The room held that for a moment.

  “Then it has to come off,” Scott said.

  “I’ve been trying for eight years,” Eliza said. “You’re welcome to try.”

  “I may know someone who can help.” Deaton’s voice carried the particular patience of a man accustomed to being the most informed person in the room and taking no pleasure in it. “Another witch. Her knowledge of binding magic is considerable, and she may also be able to give your abilities some structure — a framework. What you’re working with is powerful, but it’s raw. Uncontrolled power at that scale is as dangerous to you as it is to anyone else.”

  Eliza said nothing to that. She had known it already, had felt the truth of it in the way her gift moved through her now — unasked, ungoverned, reaching. The way it had reached for Derek the moment he walked through the door.

  She curled her fingers into a loose fist at her side and finally let herself look at him. He was still standing apart from the others, still watching her with that careful, measured stillness. There was grief in him — deep and recent — and her gift knew the shape of it the way a tongue knows a missing tooth. She had been grazing the edges of it since he arrived without meaning to, pulling at the warmth of it like a coal she could not put down, and the shame of that sat low and uncomfortable in her chest.

  She made herself hold his gaze rather than look away from it.

  It was Derek who spoke first.

  “You can stay at the Hale castle.” His voice was even, as though the decision had already been made somewhere she wasn’t privy to and he was simply stating it now as fact. “As long as you go by our rules.”

  “Another castle,” Eliza said.

  If she was any other girl, she might swoon. But she wasn’t any other girl, and castle to her sounded a lot like cage.

  Peter made a sound that might have been amusement.

  Derek didn’t acknowledge it.

  Eliza studied him for a moment — the set of his jaw, the particular quality of the stillness he carried, the way it didn’t read as emptiness but as something more deliberate than that, like a man who had learned to move carefully through a world that had given him considerable reason not to trust it.

  She understood that particular education.

  “What are the rules?” she asked.

  The slight shift at the corner of Derek’s mouth was not quite a smile, but it was something. The careful relaxation of a man who had been waiting to find out whether someone was worth dealing with at all, and had arrived at a provisional answer.

  “We’ll go over them on the way,” he said.

  She held his gaze for a moment longer than was necessary, then gave a single nod.

  Scott walked her through the logistics — Deaton would make contact with the witch, Malia would follow with a bag of hand-me-down clothes for her to wear, someone would check the perimeter before they left. She absorbed the information the way she had learned to absorb most things in the last eight years — quietly, and with the part of her mind that stayed practical when the rest of it couldn’t afford to be.

  It was only when they filed out into the cool night air and she got her first look at Derek’s vehicle — dark, solid, built like something that had never once considered not making it to its destination — that she let herself think the word she had been avoiding since she walked through that waiting room door.

  Safe.

  Not safe as in protected. Not safe as in untouchable. She had learned the hard way that those things were temporary, conditional, revocable at a moment’s notice by anyone with sufficient cruelty and the right kind of power.

  But safe as in — for the first time in eight years, she was moving toward something rather than away from it. That was different. That was something she hadn’t felt since she was fifteen years old and still believed that the world was mostly made of ordinary things.

  She opened the door.

  She got in the car.

  She did not look at the ring.