Chapter 5
Seraphina's POV
I heard his voice before I turned around.
"Seraphina." Rex Walker. Of course it was Rex. He was standing two display cases over, hands in his jacket pockets, looking at me the way people look at someone they feel sorry for but can't bring themselves to say so. "Didn't expect to see you here."
"Same." I held up the wrist guard I'd just had wrapped. "Shopping."
He glanced at the package. Something moved across his face — not surprise exactly, more like a man doing quick math in his head and not loving the answer. "That for Kaston?"
I almost said yes just to end the conversation. "It's a gift," I said. "For someone."
Rex nodded slowly. He picked up a display piece from the nearest case, turned it over, set it back down. He wasn't actually looking at it. He was buying time, and I'd known him long enough to recognize the difference.
Here's the thing about Rex: he was never cruel. That put him ahead of most people in Kaston's circle. He remembered my coffee order once. He'd asked about my cases a few times — actually asked, not the polite version where you're already walking away before the answer starts. He wasn't a bad person. He was just a loyal one, and loyalty to Kaston meant staying quiet about the things that would hurt Kaston to have said out loud.
"That's not cheap," he said finally, nodding at the wrapped package under my arm. "The stuff in this section. You don't have to — I mean, you don't need to spend that kind of money."
Oh, Rex. I looked at him. He was trying so hard. His jaw was tight and his eyes were somewhere between guilty and resigned, and I understood, in that moment, that he knew something. Maybe not everything. But something.
"I'm not spending it on what you think," I said, keeping my voice easy. "Don't worry about it."
He opened his mouth. Closed it. Nodded once, like he'd made a decision he wasn't fully at peace with. "Okay."
I said goodbye. He said take care. Neither of us pretended that covered what was actually in the room.
I watched the street through the shop window for a second after I stepped out, not because there was anything to see, but because I needed a moment before I got back in the car. The wrist guard was tucked under my arm. My bag was on my shoulder. I was fine.
I was fine, and I was also thinking about the way Rex's face had looked — that specific kind of guilt that only shows up when someone knows the truth and has decided the friendship matters more than the person being lied to. I didn't blame him. I really didn't. It's just that recognizing it clearly didn't make it feel any better.
By the time I got back to the estate, I'd stopped thinking about Rex entirely. I had other things to think about.
Back in the bedroom, I pulled out my suitcase and started folding things in properly. The wrist guard went in first, wrapped in its cloth bag, tucked into the side pocket where it wouldn't get crushed. I'd picked it out because the starstone was the right shade — deep blue, the kind that catches light without announcing itself — and because the silverwork was clean. Not flashy. Just well-made. Cassius would wear it or he wouldn't, but I'd wanted to get him something, and this felt right.
I sat back on the edge of the bed and let myself think about him for a second.
Eight years old. I'd been terrified at that winter gathering. The Aetheris estate was enormous and cold and full of adults who spoke in low voices about things I wasn't supposed to understand yet. I'd found Cassius standing near the fireplace, twelve years old and already holding himself like someone who had decided exactly how much of the room he was willing to occupy. I'd walked up to him because I was scared and he was the closest person my father had pointed out as someone I should know.
"Cassius," I'd said. And then, because I didn't know what else to call him.
He'd looked down at me. Those silver-blue eyes, steady and unimpressed. "Hello," he said, and then he looked away, back toward the window, and that was the entire conversation.
I'd been annoyed for about a week afterward. Then I'd forgotten about it. Then, years later, his mother had suggested he tutor me.
I don't need you to teach me. I'd said it flat out, the first session, arms crossed, ready to be difficult. I was fifteen and behind in every sensory training metric and deeply committed to pretending that wasn't humiliating.
He'd looked at me across the table and said, without any particular heat: But I'm going to anyway.
He was not a warm teacher. He didn't do encouragement the way other people did — the kind where the praise comes before you've done anything, just to keep you comfortable. He corrected me when I was wrong. He waited when I was slow. He explained things twice without making it feel like a second time. By the end of that summer I was scoring at the top of my age group, and I'd started showing up early to every session without quite deciding to.
I had thought of him as a brother. That's what I'd told my father when the arrangement was first proposed. I'd meant it. It hadn't been a lie or an excuse — it had been the honest, panicked reaction of someone who didn't know how to reorganize three years of comfortable familiarity into something that required a completely different vocabulary.
So I'd left. And Kaston had been there, and he had seemed so much simpler.
Funny how that works out.
I pressed my palm flat against the lid of the suitcase and exhaled.
The wrist guard was already packed. My clothes were folded. There wasn't much else — I'd never really moved in, not fully, even after three years. That should have told me something.
The bedroom door opened.
Kaston came in without knocking, which he never did, and stopped when he saw the suitcase open on the floor. Something went through his expression — not concern, more like recalibration. He looked at the bag, then at me, and I watched him decide what this was.
"Seraphina." His voice was easy. Almost warm. He leaned against the doorframe with one hand in his pocket, casual, like he'd just wandered in. "How far along are you?"
I looked at him. "Getting there."
He let a beat pass. His eyes moved to the suitcase again, then back to my face, and I could see it — the small, satisfied confidence of a man who had already decided what was happening here. He thought I was nervous. He thought the packed bag was a statement, an opening move, a way of making him take me seriously before I asked for something.
He had absolutely no idea.
"Is there something you wanted to say to me?" he asked, and the way he said it — careful, indulgent, like he was doing me a favor by asking — made something in my chest go very flat and very still.
