**Celeste’s POV**
Third coffee.
I set the cup down on the marble counter and the ceramic hit the stone with a small, clean sound that felt too loud for how quiet the morning was.
The sunlight outside was doing everything right.
I couldn’t feel any warmth in it.
I’d dreamed about his face again.
Declan’s eyes, the way they focused when he looked at me — and then the precise moment they moved.
The exact second something in his expression shifted away, like a signal changing frequency, and where it moved to was always the same place.
Her.
My phone lit up on the counter.
His name.
I picked it up before the second ring and arranged my voice into the shape he expected.
Soft.
Easy.
Present.
“Good morning.”
“Celeste.” That low, familiar register, the one I’d spent six years learning to read.
“Tonight — I was thinking about switching to Shadow Lake Lodge.
The air up there helps me think.”
My hand tightened on the phone.
Shadow Lake Lodge.
Twenty minutes from Pinewood Lodge by car.
The same mountain range, the same pine forest, the same air that existed in the part of my memory I’d spent six years keeping a locked door in front of.
I’d been so careful.
I’d built the story so precisely, lived inside it so completely that most days I almost forgot it was a construction.
Shadow Lake Lodge would put us twenty minutes from the place where the original, actual thing had happened.
“I was actually thinking,” I said, and I heard my own voice climb half a note too high, “that new Italian place just opened downtown — I heard it’s incredible, the pasta is supposed to be—”
“There’s something about the mountains,” he said, and there was something in his voice I couldn’t parse, something that hadn’t been there six months ago.
“The pine.
The way the light comes through at night.”
He was chasing something.
I could hear it.
The way a wolf sounds when it’s picked up a trail and doesn’t know yet what it’s following.
“I have an early meeting tomorrow,” I cut in, steadier this time, forcing the words out clean and calm.
“What about your place? This chapter is updated first at g.com.
I’ll come cook dinner.
It’ll be better than a restaurant anyway.”
A pause.
Short.
“Sure,” he said.
“Come over then.”
He had no idea.
That was the part that never stopped striking me — he had genuinely no idea that a simple suggestion had just pulled me back from the edge of something I couldn’t afford to fall into.
“I’ll be there at seven,” I said, and ended the call before he could add anything else.
I slid down the kitchen wall and sat on the floor.
Just sat there, back against the cabinets, phone in my lap, the morning sun making a bright rectangle on the tile in front of me that I stared at without seeing.
Six years.
Six years of building one lie until it was load-bearing.
Until it held up an entire structure — his guilt, his obligation, the access he gave me, the future I’d been constructing piece by careful piece on top of a foundation that had one catastrophic flaw.
The photographs proved I’d been at Pinewood Lodge that night.
They proved nothing else.
The person who had actually been in room 302 was Savannah.
That was the truth.
That had always been the truth, the real event underneath the story I’d plastered over it.
Vivienne’s drug, slipped into her water before training.
My fake distress message, designed to get her to the Lodge.
A plan that was supposed to be controlled, contained, directed at specific goals that had nothing to do with Declan Voss.
We hadn’t known he’d be there.
Neither of us had known that, had calculated for that, had even considered it possible.
He was supposed to be in Portland for pack business.
He wasn’t supposed to walk down that corridor, wasn’t supposed to push open a door that had been left slightly ajar, wasn’t supposed to find her in that room.
And he certainly wasn’t supposed to leave something behind.
I reached up and touched it now, fingers finding it automatically, the way I’d reached for it every morning for six years.
Cool silver against my throat, the Voss family engraving worn smooth in the places my fingers had touched it most.
I’d put it on the morning I went to find him with my story prepared and my photographs ready, and I’d worn it like a declaration.
Like proof of identity.
Like something that belonged to me.
Lately, every time the metal touched my skin, what I felt was the weight of a rope.
Not a chain.
A rope.
The kind with a fixed length.
I pushed myself up off the floor.
Picked up my keys from the counter without giving myself time to think about whether this was a good idea, because thinking about it was exactly how I talked myself out of doing things that needed doing.
I needed to know what Savannah remembered.
Vivienne had been confident.
She’d been very, very confident about what the drug would and wouldn’t do to memory — she knew her compounds, had been specific and certain when she’d told me the memories of that night would be fragmented at best, gone entirely at worst.
Savannah would wake up disoriented, in pain, with nothing she could use or prove.
That was the plan’s entire scaffolding.
But there was one thing Vivienne hadn’t calculated for.
One thing I hadn’t calculated for.
One thing that had been sitting inside my chest like a splinter since the first time I’d seen a photograph of him — a school photo, the kind they take in autumn with a plain background, a little boy in a green sweater looking directly at the camera with an expression that was serious and certain and so familiar it had stopped my breath.
Six years old.
Dark curls.
A face that was Savannah’s structure, Savannah’s bones.
And eyes the exact color of Declan Voss’s eyes, in the exact shape of Declan Voss’s eyes, with the same quality of light in them that I had spent six years trying to make him turn on me.
Amber-brown.
Warm.
Unmistakable.
Finn’s eyes.
Identical, in every detail that mattered, to Declan’s.