C H A P T E R FIVE:The Note

It was on my door when I got home. No envelope. No footprints. Just a single folded card pressed flat against the wood, held by nothing, like it had simply decided to be there.

I stood in the hallway for three seconds before I touched it. Then I peeled it free and opened it.

The handwriting was precise and unhurried, the kind that belonged to someone who had never once written anything in a rush.

Sable Vane. Or should I call you Voss. I have been waiting a very long time. We should speak before you make any decisions about what comes next. Not because I am asking. Because what you do not know about your own story will get you killed.

Below the words, a seal I had never seen in person but had read about once, in a reference text at the security firm, in a section marked with a red tab and the word dangerous underlined twice. A Noctari Court seal. The formal seal of the Eternal Court itself, last used publicly two hundred years ago.

One initial below it. C.

I stood in the hallway of my building above the dry cleaner's and looked at the card for a long time. Then I went inside and knocked on the wall twice, which was the signal I used when I needed Jace without wanting to say so out loud.

He was through my door in forty seconds. He looked at the card in my hand and then looked at my face.

"How bad?" he said.

"That depends." I handed him the card. "How much do you know about the Noctari Sovereign?"

Jace read the card. Something shifted in his expression, something careful and contained, and I had known him long enough to know that look. It was the look he got when he already knew something and was deciding whether this was the moment to say it.

"Jace."

"He's ancient," Jace said. "The Vorrkai have encountered the Eternal Court twice in living memory. Both times the encounter ended with someone dead and someone else owing a debt they spent decades repaying." He handed the card back. "He doesn't reach out to people, Sera. He summons them. The fact that this is worded like an invitation is unusual enough to be concerning."

"He says I don't know everything about my own story."

"He's probably right."

I looked at him. "Do you know something about my story that you haven't told me?"

A beat. One beat too long. Then he said, "I think you should meet with him first. Get the full picture. Then we talk."

I felt the edge of something in that answer. Something I was not going to get to the bottom of tonight. I filed it and let it go for now, because Jace had never once done anything that was not in my interest, and I had enough new information to process without adding suspicion about the one person I trusted completely.

The next morning I followed the instructions on the reverse side of the card, which I had almost missed. A time. An address. Nothing else.

The address led me to a building in the financial district that had no signage and no apparent business purpose and a lobby that was too cold and too quiet and smelled of something old and metallic that I recognized from my own bond-burn, something iron and ancient and alive in a way that made Lyra press forward and bare her teeth.

A man was waiting in the lobby. He was tall, pale, and still in the way of things that did not need to fidget because they had long since run out of things to be nervous about. His eyes were the color of old wine, deep red with something darker underneath, and he looked at me the way I had only ever been looked at once before.

Like he already knew exactly who I was.

"Seraphina Voss," he said. Not a greeting. A statement.

"Cain," I said, because the card had told me his name and I was not going to give him the upper hand of being the only one in this room who knew who they were talking to.

Something moved at the corner of his mouth. Not quite a smile. "You are exactly what the prophecy described," he said. "I have been watching your bloodline for two hundred years. Your grandmother was extraordinary. Your mother would have been. And you." He looked at me steadily. "You are what the prophecy was always pointing toward."

"You said there are things about my story I don't know," I said. "Tell me one."

He was quiet for a moment. Then he said, "I was present when the curse on your bloodline was commissioned."

The air in the room felt different after that. Heavier.

"You were there," I said.

"Yes."

"And you did not stop it."

"No," he said. "I did not."

I looked at him. I kept my face very still. But inside me, behind the fracturing seal, something was pressing forward with a heat that was not entirely the Silvervoice and not entirely anger and was both of those things at once.

"Then this conversation," I said, "is going to be very interesting."

He nodded, slowly, like he had expected exactly this. "Yes," he said. "It is."

What he told me in that room over the next two hours did not just change my plan. It changed the entire map. It changed the shape of everything I thought I understood about why I had been made omega, about why the rejection happened the night it did, about the vault in the Drayden household and who had put the vessel there and why.

And at the very end, he told me something about Kael's mother that made me sit completely still for a full minute before I trusted myself to speak.

Mira Drayden had not simply chosen Celeste Varro for political reasons. She had known about the Voss prophecy since before Kael was born. The rejection had been her design. Not his. She had spent years engineering the conditions that would ensure he would refuse the bond on sight, that he would have been conditioned to see omega as beneath him, that he would have had exactly enough pride and exactly enough political pressure to say no in public without hesitating.

She had weaponized her own son against me. And he had not known.

I left the building in the grey afternoon light and stood on the pavement outside and breathed, and Lyra was very quiet beside me, and I was very quiet inside myself.

Then I took out my phone and called Elara.

"We need Thessaly," I said when she answered. "We need her now. And Jace needs to be there too, because I have something to say to him and I want witnesses."

There was a pause. Then Elara said, "What happened?"

"Everything," I said. "Everything happened. And I am done waiting to do something about it."