One of Mireille’s memories.
Mireille was…in the backyard of Cassandra’s childhood home?
And holy High Gods. That was Cassandra’s father she was looking upon.
She didn’t know how it was possible to feel any more grief than she already felt, but the sight of her father—his crinkled blue-gray eyes and long braided beard—debilitated her.
There was a haziness to the memory, and Papa was surrounded by a kaleidoscopic halo.
She nearly croaked out his name before Cassandra herself—spectral, but not multi-colored—rushed over on spindly pre-teen limbs wielding her wooden practice dagger.
Mireille had seen a vision of Cassandra and her father in the Halfway? And she’d never told her?
In the memory, Mireille turned toward another glowing presence: a man with dark hair and familiar smoky eyes. The view immediately shifted.
Something pierced Cassandra’s chest, and she jolted into a different mind.
A mind in the present, not a memory. She could tell the difference.
Memories had a long-simmered flavor that deepened with age.
This vision tasted fresh.
Whoever’s mind she occupied was sharpening a broadsword with a skull-head pommel on the porch of a cabin in a snowy, moonlit forest.
Wind bit her cheeks and the soft stillness smelled of frosted pine needles.
The view shifted and Cassandra jolted back into her own mind.
“—give up on yourself like that,” Mireille finished, as if no time at all had passed. Her features twisted with confusion at Cassandra’s shocked expression. “What?”
Cassandra’s grief morphed into the most righteous fury.
Mireille had been hiding things. And Cassandra’s powers were changing, more quickly than she could keep up with.
It was all too overwhelming.
She ripped her hand out of Mireille’s grip, then fled to the bathroom, slammed the door, and turned on the shower.
She stripped off her clothes and sank beneath the spray.
And wished for the water to melt her into oblivion.
Ronin drummedhis tattooed fingers on the dining table while Mireille fiddled around in the kitchen.
“What happened when she touched you?” he asked.
“I have no idea,” Mireille admitted, not turning to him. “There was a tickling pressure in my head. Honestly, if her expression hadn’t changed so dramatically, I’m not sure I would have even noticed it. It almost felt like…like she was tiptoeing through my brain.”
Ronin chewed on a fingernail. “She’d been restoring obliviates in the colonies. Her power had been evolving even before she was Turned. Between becoming Fae and whatever happened to her in that pool in the Halfway…”
Creator, he felt terrible. Cassandra was navigating this confusing transformation—not to mention the devastating news she’d learned about Tristan— with two strangers she’d just met.
And he’d scolded her the minute she’d woken up.
Fuck, he wasn’t very good at offering comfort when someone was in pain.
Or he wasn’t anymore. He’d done so once, for the female heating a pot of water over the hearth. Though the stubborn she-wolf had barely wanted to accept his help at the time.
