He Needs His Biological Mother (Lyra's POV)

I thought I had seen enough of the absurd.

Five years of drifting through a fog of lost memory, then returning—with nothing but fragments—to the city that had nearly killed me. I thought all of that had inoculated me against the world's capacity for the unexpected.

What I hadn't anticipated was that a man who had just pressed a gun to my forehead would, under the fluorescent wash of a hospital corridor, ask me in that same glacial tone whether I would marry him.

I stood there for a full three seconds, unable to move.

"I'm sorry—what?"

"You heard me." Alistair didn't repeat himself. He simply looked at me, steady and unhurried, as though he had just said something entirely unremarkable.

I drew a slow breath and made myself speak with what I hoped sounded like composure. "My answer is no."

"Why?"

I had expected a pause—some small concession to the weight of what had just passed between us. Instead, his question came faster than my refusal had, his voice carrying no anger, no wounded pride, only a certainty that unsettled me far more than either of those things would have.

I didn't like that feeling at all.

"Because this makes no sense," I said. "We met for the first time tonight."

"Marriage has never been purely a function of how long two people have known each other."

"But it ought to have something to do with whether both people are willing," I said, meeting his eyes. "And I am not willing."

"You haven't given yourself enough time to consider it."

"I've considered it."

A nurse passed behind us, pushing a medication cart, its wheels tracing a low, metallic hum across the linoleum. We stood there at the entrance to the emergency ward, conducting what had to be the most surreal conversation of my life.

I understood then that I needed a stronger argument—something he couldn't dismantle with one quiet sentence.

"Cassian doesn't need me," I said, and my voice came out softer than I intended. "He needs his biological mother."

The words landed in the corridor and seemed to still the air around us.

Something shifted in Alistair's expression—barely perceptible, the way a surface changes when pressure is applied to a point that has long been buried beneath composure.

He was quiet for perhaps five seconds. When he spoke, his voice had dropped. "The reason Cassian won't speak, won't trust anyone—that is because of his biological mother."

I went still.

"She is the reason he is the way he is," he continued. "He doesn't lack a mother. What he lacks is someone who won't hurt him."

The memory surfaced before I could stop it: Cassian's eyes in that alley, fixed on me—not simple fear, but fear threaded through with something cautious and fragile, the look of a child who has been let down so many times that hope itself has become a thing he only dares to feel in secret.

Something tightened in my chest.

But I couldn't let that tightening make a decision for both of us.

"Even so," I said, "I'm not the right person. The gap between us—"

"What gap?"

"Class." I said it plainly, unwilling to dress it up. "The Voss family is what it is, and I am what I am. I don't think I need to spell that out. I'm an ordinary architect. If you're looking for someone to co-parent Cassian, you should at least find someone who can hold her own in your world—"

"I don't need someone who can hold her own in that world." His tone didn't waver. "Cassian has been surrounded by exactly those people. You've seen what that produced."

I opened my mouth and found nothing there.

"And," he added, "Cassian spoke tonight. In front of you."

That landed like something driven into wood—clean, precise, lodged in the center of every rebuttal I had been assembling.

I looked at the closed door of the emergency room and thought of that sound: small and hoarse and barely two syllables, don't go, pressed into the fabric of my jacket from somewhere in the vicinity of my collarbone. The first word he had spoken, apparently, in a very long time.

I didn't know what to make of it. Perhaps it was coincidence. Perhaps it was only the instinctive cry of a frightened child in a frightening moment. I couldn't use it to argue against him, because I couldn't argue against it myself.

"Mr. Voss." I shifted my approach. "Do you actually know anything about me? You'd be willing to bring a stranger into Cassian's life—into your home—based on one evening? Doesn't that strike you as a profoundly irrational decision?"

"I've met enough people," he said, "to know the difference between a performance and a genuine reaction. What you showed Cassian tonight was genuine."

I exhaled slowly, feeling every possible exit being sealed off with the same unhurried precision he brought to everything else.

I needed to leave. Right now, immediately, before he found another angle.

I glanced down at my wrist out of reflex, then looked up and forced my voice into something that approximated exasperated sincerity. "I have a work meeting I need to get to."

Alistair said nothing. He only watched me.

"I came to Verona for a project," I said, aware that my words were coming slightly faster than usual. "The meeting time—I need to check."

I reached into my coat pocket for my phone, and then remembered: it had been knocked to the ground during the struggle in the alley and had been off ever since. I pressed the power button. The screen lit up, turned its slow circle, and began loading.

"Whatever time the meeting is," Alistair said, "I need an answer from you first."

"I can't give you an answer under these conditions. I need time."

"How much time?"

"Enough to be sure I know what I'm doing."

He looked at me for a long moment. Then, in a move I genuinely had not predicted, he took a half-step back. "I'll give you twenty-four hours."

Not an offer. A notification.

I didn't argue, because in that same instant my phone screen filled with the backlog of notifications it had been holding since the night before, and the first line of text caught the edge of my vision—

Croft Group Project Lead: Ms. Vane, due to a scheduling change, tomorrow's meeting has been moved up to 9:00 a.m. Please confirm whether this works for you—

The message had been sent at eleven o'clock the previous night.

I stared at that line and felt something cold begin to climb my spine.

I opened the full message. Not only had the time been moved up, but the notification had arrived while my phone was already off—which meant I had seen none of it, confirmed nothing, and was currently standing in a hospital corridor in yesterday's clothes with my materials sitting in a hotel room across the city.

I looked up at the clock at the far end of the corridor.

Eight twenty-seven.

Thirty-three minutes until nine. I was still in the hospital. My files were at the hotel. The hotel was—I ran the distance and the route through my head in rapid, unflattering succession, and arrived at a conclusion that landed somewhere in my stomach like a stone.

I was genuinely going to be late.