Shadows pooled in the corners when I blinked awake—soft, late gold leaking around the curtains, the kind of light that makes dust float like tiny planets. My belly felt heavy with broth and honey-bitter draught, my mouth cotton-edged. For three breaths I floated, not here, not anywhere.

Then the wrongness clicked in.

Silence. Not actual silence—the house still hummed its old animal hum; the lanterns still ticked warm—but my body’s map of the room had gone blunt. No steady drum of Cassie’s heartbeat pressed against my back. No bright, clean thread of her citrus-vanilla scent braided through the air. No rosemary steam clinging to my skin, no ozone prickle from my own power sparking under my ribs. Everything smelled… less. Like someone had set the world to low.

I cataloged the absence the way my brain always does. 1) No heartbeat against scapula. 2) Ambient smell = linen, soap, a faint trace of cedar from the hall—no lily-bite from Seara’s temper, no mint-sting of salve in the air. 3) Fire status: not a river, not even a creek. Ember. Quiet. Wrong.

I stared at my hands to anchor. They were my hands—they were always my hands—but the light caught on a skin that didn’t halo with ember-thread. No faint star-fleck under the surface, no pull toward blaze. Just… skin. Freckled, human-warm, whole in a way that felt like a lie.

My fingers twitched for my usual stim—three taps, three taps—but the motion snagged at my side. Pain bloomed, sharp and mean. Okay, still me. Still broken.

I lifted my palm to my ear. Rounded. Not razor-tipped. The smallest panic geysered up my throat.

Glamour. I reached for it out of sheer habit—green eyes, rounded ears, ginger—and hit nothing. No shimmer, no Veil. Just that same human stillness inside my bones. If this wasn’t glamour—and it couldn’t be; glamour was a smudged-out word in my body today—then what—

“Lightning bug?”

Elias’s voice. Soft and careful, like acoustic rain. A scrape of chair legs; I felt the displacement of air as he leaned in before I actually turned my head. His inhale sharpened at the edges, barely-there, the sound of a father pretending not to panic.

Seara didn’t pretend. The heat in the room shifted; I could taste lilies at the back of my tongue even before she spoke. “Don’t move,” she said gently, and there was steel under gentleness. “You’re waking into it. Let your body tell you what it is.”

Waking into what. I swallowed, throat paper-dry, and made myself look down.

The curve of me was wrong and familiar at once. My waist was still narrow, but not the knife-edged narrow my fae form holds without trying; my hips had a little more mortal gravity to them. My breasts—still mine, still present—looked different against the fall of the nightgown, weight settling in a way that would’ve made my tailor complain about darts. My hair spilled across the pillow a deep, natural ginger—still vivid, still sleek, but not lit from within. No ember kissing the ends. Just… hair.

The cuts were there. Neat lines under clean bandage windows, edges pinking instead of flaring. Bruises had shifted from angry plum to something jaundiced around the rim, the kind of yellow-brown that means “old” on mortal skin. Progress. Not fae-fast, but—not nothing. My ribs told a different story. They ached with that dense, splintered pressure, a wrong puzzle that someone had forced pieces into. Broken. Still broken.

My breath scattered. “I—” A dozen words crowded: broken, wrong, human, help. None of them fit.

Cassie was already there, the mattress dipping as she leaned in. Her eyes—the exact icy blue that slices me open and stitches me shut—found mine. Her palm cupped my cheek, thumb landing at the hinge where I clench. “You’re still you, Firefly.”

The way she said it, like a fact of physics, reordered the room.

I tried to match her tone and failed. “Cass… I can’t feel it.” I hated how small I sounded. “The hum. It’s like—” I groped for comparison, everything too bright and too dull. “Like someone put a blanket over the sun.”

“Not gone,” she said. “Banked.” She pressed a kiss to my forehead, a precise anchor. “Breathe with me.”

Three beats. I took them because she asked, because saying no to Cassie has never been one of my talents.

In. Out. The blanket didn’t lift. But the panic threaded itself into smaller strands, something I could hold without cutting my hands.

“What do you feel?” Seara asked, careful. Not the High Lady requesting a report. My mother asking what her girl’s body was doing.

“Muted,” I said. “Scents. Sound. Even… color?” I squinted at the curtains; their red looked a notch toward brick instead of blood. “And heavier? Not bad-heavy. Just… mortal.”

Elias’s hand hovered near my shoulder without landing. “Any dizziness? Nausea?”

“Only the kind that comes from having too many parents,” I muttered, because the alternative was crying, and I was too tired to cry pretty. My voice wobbled anyway. “What is this?”

I expected theory. A healer-word. Veil-something. Instead Seara’s eyes softened into something like recognition that scared me more than any diagnosis. Her gaze flicked from my rounded ear to my—everything—and she exhaled through her nose like she’d been bracing for this punch all afternoon.

“Shift,” she said simply. “Not glamour. Deeper. The body choosing a safer shape.”

“Safer?” The word tasted wrong on my tongue. “I don’t—how is this safer?”

“Because the Veil is loud right now,” Elias said quietly. “And you burned hard. Overburn and taint stress, the healers said. A mortal form is quieter to the Veil. It asks less of your fire while you mend.”

My brain grabbed at the puzzle like a cat with string. Shift. Not a mask, not a trick of light. A hinge in the bones. Somewhere under the ache, something old stirred, like a fox rolling in new snow. The idea should have exhilarated me. It mostly annoyed me that it had chosen its debut without asking.

“I didn’t choose this,” I said, stubborn on reflex.

Seara’s mouth tilted, not quite a smile. “Sometimes the body chooses for us until we learn to choose with it.”

I stared at my rounded ear again, every old ache of hiding and every new ache of being seen getting tangled. “It’s… still pretty,” I said, and I hadn’t meant to say it aloud; it fell out anyway, embarrassing and true. “Different pretty. Less… comet. More… girl.”

Cassie’s thumb paused, pressed once harder at my jaw. “I like every version,” she said. “I’ll file a formal complaint if you try to make yourself ugly.”

“Can’t,” I whispered, and a breathy laugh escaped, shaky as a fledgling. “Tragic.”

Elias huffed, relieved. The tension in the room thinned a fraction. I felt it, the way I always do—microshifts in everyone’s breath, the soft exhale of a crisis pushed to later.

Outside, down the hall, boot leather whispered—a cadence I was starting to read as Roran’s. The wards hummed a note lower as the door opened on a careful hinge.

“Visitors,” came Roran’s voice, pitched low so it didn’t carry. He stepped aside, and Lucien and Alina ghosted into the doorway like they were trying not to disturb the molecules.

Lucien’s gaze went straight to my face. He stopped dead, jaw working. For a heartbeat something like grief flickered through his eyes, then confusion, then a steadier thing I couldn’t name. He looked like my brother again. Messy hair, sleeves shoved to his elbows, worry telegraphed in every line of his shoulders. The ridiculous pink nightgown had been banished for a black T-shirt. Progress.

Alina, at his shoulder, took me in like the way people look at stained glass from up close—wondering how the pieces hold together. Her mouth parted, then shut, then parted again. I watched her register rounded ears, ginger hair without ember, the mortal tilt of my waist. Her curiosity was so clean it didn’t sting.

“Hi,” I said, because eloquence is my brand.

“Hi,” she whispered back, like we were at the edge of a secret.

Lucien’s hands flexed at his sides. “You look…” He stopped. Searched. Chose carefully. “Like you.”

The words landed better than any compliment I would have believed.

Roran slid inside and took up his usual post by the wall, eyes scanning windows, corners, the door, me. Always moving, always counting. He nodded once at Seara; some silent update passed between them.

I eased a fraction higher on the pillows, testing the way this body held pain. Almost the same. Slightly kinder at the surface. The broken things still screamed under movement, but the scream had fewer teeth. I could breathe all the way to seven before the hitch. That felt like a victory I didn’t know where to put.

Cassie clocked the strain before I could fake past it. She slipped an arm behind my shoulders, shoulder under mine, turning human architecture into a brace. “Don’t be heroic,” she murmured, which made me want to be heroic out of spite, which made me stay still because spite is a great therapist.

Alina edged closer, eyes bright. “Is this… normal?”

“For us?” Elias said dry, and his smile reached his eyes this time. “Define normal.”

“It’s not glamour,” I said, more to hear it in my own voice than to educate anyone. I touched my ear, the smooth curve of it. “It’s… me. But human.” The words slotted into place. “I think my body picked quiet.”

Lucien’s mouth did a thing that might have been a flinch, might have been pride. “Yeah, well,” he said gruffly. “You were never very quiet.”

“Rude,” I breathed, and the banter felt like a floorboard I trusted.

Seara hadn’t moved from her place at my side. She watched them all like a meteorologist reads a sky—mapping crosswinds, measuring pressure. Her hand found a strand of my ginger hair and smoothed it once, almost absently, like checking a talisman. “You’ll choose it on purpose eventually,” she said, too mild to be anything but certain. “For now, let it hold.”

A beat stretched. My senses did their automatic sweep: Cassie’s pulse steady against my arm. Elias’s breath evening. Lucien’s foot scuff—the tell he gets when he wants to do something with his hands and doesn’t know what. Alina’s perfume—a sliver of rose under laundry soap. The house’s wards thrumming low, old, safe. My fire, an ember behaving itself.

I exhaled. “Okay,” I said, and I meant it in that small way that means: for the next ten minutes, at least, I won’t fight my own bones.

Lucien blinked like that answer mattered more than he’d expected. Alina’s shoulders softened a fraction. Roran’s stance didn’t change, but the line of his jaw unclenched.

Cassie squeezed my hand. “Scale of one to ten?” she asked again, habitual.

“Less annoying,” I said, which still wasn’t a number. Her smile said she’d take it.

The console on the low table winked like a mischievous eye. Alina followed my gaze, then looked back to me, hopeful. “You up for VeilCart?” she asked, voice careful as if it were a sacred ritual instead of a ridiculous game with glittering foxes and spiteful mushrooms.

My ribs protested at the idea of laughing. My heart said please. “One race,” I bargained.

“Two,” Lucien countered on reflex.

“Fine. But I hold the controller between races and if you grimace I steal it.” Cassie’s voice was mock-tyrannical, but her thumb kept drawing slow figure-eights on the back of my hand—the tide that always steadied me.

I huffed and took the controller. It was heavier than I remembered, cool plastic warmed by my palms; the joysticks were slick with oil from a thousand thumbs. The first press of the start button sent a little thrill through my fingers, a tiny electrical tick that I felt like a promise.

Alina dropped beside Lucien, knees practically vibrating with excitement. “Okay, spoiler: I do not accept VeilBombs,” she declared, as solemn as a treaty.

Lucien’s grin was daylight itself. “Tough luck.”

The track flashed up—streets of a glittering fae carnival, lanterns bobbing, sudden ramps over pools of mirrored moonlight. Tiny sprites—our carts—skittered like startled beetles. The speakers filled the room with the game’s sing-song music and the cheery announcer: “Ready—set—GO!”

I nudged the joystick. My cart leapt. Pain hissed, a hot, immediate line under the ribs, but laughter wanted out so badly it tasted metallic. I kept my face deliberately neutral, the way I used to hide aches behind a joke. Cassie’s hand hovered, then settled on the mattress beside mine like an anchor.

Lucien barreled into the first turn like he owned the asphalt. He’d always been fast that way, in games and in life—an all-in kind of speed. He whooped and drifted past me. “Eat my dust, princess,” he crowed.

“Watch your language,” I shot back, thumb working the throttle. “You’ll be scraping glitter off the pavement.”

Alina’s cart cut in elegantly, carving the inside line with reckless precision. She sounded like she’d been playing VeilCart forever. “Don’t call me precious,” she giggled, “I’ll be the one who laughs when your cart explodes—”

—and then Lucien launched a VeilBomb. Pure, unrepentant malice wedged in pixel form. The screen erupted. My cart spun, went sideways, kissed a spectral mushroom, and became a tiny orb of sparks.

I shrieked, half from the surprise and half because my ribs protested like a betrayed animal. “Lucien! What the actual—cheater!”

He howled with laughter. “You made it personal.”

Alina clapped, delighted. The sound was bright and mortal and it felt like balm. Cassie’s dry comment cut across the chaos. “This is the dumbest royal summit I’ve ever attended,” she said, deadpan, and then she laughed—an honest, short bark that made my chest loosen.

Play blurred into its own private weather. We traded silly insults and theatrical threats—my most reliable: “I will set your kart on fire,” which I delivered with such mock-venom that even Cassie snorted. Lucien retaliated with a ridiculous taunt about fashion choices, and Alina made an offended face that was half wounded and half flirt. I kept one hand light on the controller but let my other hand find Cassie’s thigh, letting her pressure be the metronome that told my muscles this was safe.

Between races, Cassie did as promised: she pinched my knee once and held the controller like a guardian. “No grimaces,” she said, eyeing my face for any wobble. I pulled a stupid expression—tongue out, eyes crossed—and she rolled her eyes, but her fingers flattened where my pulse beat. “Spoiled brat,” she muttered, but the affection in it warmed the damp of my nerves.

From their chairs, Seara and Elias watched like sculptures softened by lamplight. My father’s laugh came low and surprised when Lucien lost spectacularly by running into a gaggle of spiteful mushrooms. My mother’s hands, folded in her lap, had that small looseness I’d come to crave—the sign she was letting the room exist as family and not theatre. When I glanced up and caught her looking, our eyes met and she gave me the tiniest of nods. It felt like permission.

Alina, flushed, leaned forward as the next race queued. “Rematch?” she asked me, hopeful.

“Rematch,” I agreed. I felt steadier now, not because the ribs had stopped aching but because the room had settled into something like permission to be small and loud at once. The controller hummed beneath my thumbs like a living thing, and my attentions narrowed—corners, ramps, the flash of a VeilBomb warning. Sensory overload that would have unspooled me another morning now braided itself into focus: the click of a button, the whir of tiny motors, Cassie’s inhale, the smell of rosemary from the earlier bath still clinging to the linens like a promise.

The race was closer this time. I leaned—not with my shoulders, because that would have been a crime against my ribs—but with my hips, a small shift that felt like cheating. I feinted left, then right, remembering a trick Lucien and I used when we were ten and dared each other down steep roofs. The controller responded; my cart swung ahead, a slipstream of pixelated light propelling me past Lucien with a triumphant squeal from Alina.

“Did she—what—” Lucien sputtered, indignation high and theatrical. “No fair!”

“Skill,” I said, triumphant and exhausted. Cassie whooped and shoved the controller at me for a victory lap, then snatched it back after one celebratory corner, playing possum-tyrant to my tiny queen.

Alina laughed so hard she hiccuped. I felt the ridiculousness of the moment—the absurdity of us, stitched together in a palace room like any apartment in the city, doing childish things while the rest of the world roared and wrote and schemed outside the walls. It made my throat raw and, oddly, relieved.

When the game finally wound down—scores tallied, jokes exchanged, a mock-ceremony in which I was crowned Grand Junker of VeilCart—Elias rose and stretched, looking like a man who’d remembered how to sit still because something precious had told him how. “Same time tomorrow?” he asked, half to Lucien but mostly to the room.

Seara’s smile was small, private. “If you must,” she said, but her eyes lingered on Alina and Lucien, on Cassie and me, and the corners of her mouth softened in a way that felt like lifting a weight.

I rested back against the pillows, the itch at my ribs now a dull, manageable drum instead of an alarm. My palms still buzzed from the game’s feedback. Alina leaned her head against Lucien’s shoulder, scooting close like she belonged there, and my chest contracted with something raw and aching and hopeful.

Cassie’s thumb found my pulse and slowed, a quiet metronome. “You good?” she asked.

I let the hush settle over me, felt the softness of the room like a hand around my shoulders. “Yeah,” I said, and because I believed it for the first time in hours, I meant it. “One more race tomorrow.”

Alina’s head stayed on Lucien’s shoulder, but her eyes slid to me, bright and careful. “So… what’s it like?” she asked. “Being—human.”

I let the question sit. The room’s sounds stacked in softer layers than I was used to: the console’s low hum, linen whispering when Cassie shifted, the slow creak of my father’s chair as he leaned back—no chorus of ward-heartbeats in the walls, no faraway footfalls braided into a building’s bones. Quieter. But not quiet.

“It’s… dimmer and louder at the same time,” I said at last. “Like someone turned the glow down and turned the world up.”

Alina tilted her head. “Turned… what glow?”

I stared at our joined hands. In fae-skin, my palm always carried a low ember-buzz; now it was just skin-warm, pulse a mortal thrum. “I don’t hear Cassie’s heartbeat,” I admitted, voice catching on the shape of it. “When she sleeps against me, it’s usually—right there. A drum under my cheek. I miss it.” I breathed her in—citrus and linen and faint smoke—and found the edges of it dulled, as if a window had fogged. “Scents are… softer. Balance is heavier. My fire’s still here, but it feels like a cat shut in a different room.”

Cassie’s thumb paused over my pulse. “You’re still you, Firefly,” she murmured.

“I know.” And I did. But there was a Mira-shaped ache where the extra senses usually sat, and it rang a little when I moved.

For a minute we only listened—to the game’s idle chime, to Lucien’s breath under Alina’s temple, to the way the house settled like an old, proud animal curling its tail around us.

“There’s something I should say,” I said into that hush, before my nerve bled out. The words made my tongue feel too big. “I owe you all… the whole of it.”

Cassie’s fingers tightened once around mine and let go—space granted. Elias’s gaze sharpened; Seara’s did not waver.

I looked at Alina first, because courage is easier to find when it’s reflected back unjudging. “Last night I blurted a thing and then ran from it.” My chest pinched. “I was assigned male at birth.”

Alina didn’t flinch. Her brows lifted, curious, then smoothed into something gentle. Lucien went very still beside her.

“I’ve always been a girl,” I said, and the relief of saying that to the room loosened something in my ribs that pain hadn’t touched. “Everyone at home knew it—even when I was… trying to be what my body said. I wore dresses. I climbed trees in them. I was allowed to be soft and loud and me. But when puberty started, it felt like my own skin was closing a door in my face. I couldn’t bear it.”

The mint-iron taste of old fear ghosted my tongue. “When I was fourteen, Lucien and I broke into the Firebrand archives.” I shot him a wry look; his ears pinked. “We found a shaping spell. It was supposed to match the outside to the inside.” I swallowed. “I didn’t want to lose my family in the bargain, so I begged—willed—the spell to leave your memories of… everything. Of who I’d been while I was trying to be a son. That wasn’t part of the magic. But something listened. The world knows me as Mira because it always has. You remember the path I walked to get here.”

Seara’s fingers laced with Elias’s across the gap between their chairs—small, unshowy. He nodded once like he could still hear the fourteen-year-old me explaining a plan he’d never have approved.

I took another breath and found Lucien’s eyes. He was only a year behind me and suddenly he looked five years younger, gangly and braced. “When my body started changing the way I wanted,” I said softly, “you pulled back. You told me at the dance you didn’t know how to be my brother with me like this.” I swallowed the hurt and wrapped both hands around the truth. “I miss you. I want you in my life the way you were before and also not-before. I want VeilCart marathons and real games and fries so salty they ruin our teeth. I want to be your wingwoman—” I tipped Alina a little wink “—and your worst influence and your best friend again. I’m still me, Lu. I never stopped being your sister.”

He blinked fast. His mouth worked and then stilled. For a heartbeat I heard every tiny sound in the room because my body wanted to sprint and I couldn’t move: the faint buzz of the console, the lace-crackle of a log shifting in the hearth two rooms away, the little chime Alina’s bracelet made when she drew breath.

“I was scared,” he said, voice rough-edged. “Not of you. Of… messing it up. I missed you and didn’t know how to say it, so I made it your fault.” He scrubbed a hand over his face, then reached for me the way he always had—awkward, earnest. “I’m sorry. I want all of that. I want you.”

The apology landed like warm weight over cold. I leaned forward carefully and hugged him. His arms came around me, solid, and for a second the old map of us overlaid the new one and both made sense. When I kissed his cheek, he made a mortally offended noise and Alina laughed into his shoulder, which felt exactly right.

Then I turned to the place the floor always steadied: Cassie. “I should’ve told you,” I said, forcing my voice over the softest ground. “I didn’t mean to keep it from you. I… forget, most days. I’m just me. Last night the words fell out because Lucien cracked me open and I was loopy and—” I broke off, because excuses were not what she deserved. “I’m sorry.”

Cassie didn’t speak for a long breath. She just looked at me. The quiet of it made my skin tight and hot. My mind started its old sprint toward worst-case cliffs; the room tilted like a ship. Her thumb slid once over the tendon in my wrist—grounding, deliberate—and she nodded to herself, like she’d found a file and closed it.

Cassie’s palm stayed warm over mine, her voice steady and fierce.

“You are my Miracle. If you were a boy again one day, if you were neither, if you were somewhere else entirely—fae, human, fox, queen of tiny gremlins—you’d still be mine. I love you because you’re you. The rest is wardrobe changes.”

Heat burned up my nose. “I don’t deserve you.”

“I know,” she said, perfectly grave. “And yet.”

Seara let out a breath that could have melted iron bars. Elias’s eyes shone. Alina made a soft, delighted sound like someone being handed a secret and a cup of tea at once. The Small Folk fox on the console sneezed glitter, because of course.

Lucien cleared his throat like he’d been given his cue back. “About that wingwoman comment,” he muttered. “You were… effective.”

Alina’s cheeks went pink. “Very effective.”

I grinned, shaky and real. “Please. I’m incredible at my job.”

“You’re fired,” Lucien said promptly. “Conflict of interest.”

We all laughed, and my ribs complained, and the game chirped; the sound felt like a small, stubborn stitch pulling the room tighter into something that fit. I sank back into the pillows and let the ache be part of the furniture instead of a monster under the bed. Cassie’s shoulder warmed beneath my head. I couldn’t hear her pulse in this human skin—like a glass set between two rooms—but I could feel her certainty, soft and steady, the way a boat leans into tether.

“Tomorrow,” I said, aiming for swagger and landing on something truer, “I’m destroying both of you on Starfall Speedway.”

“Cheater talk,” Lucien snorted. Alina squeezed his knee—two quick pulses like a second heartbeat—and grinned at me. “Game on, princess.”

The word sat on my collarbone like a pebble. Not a weight this time; a point of balance.

Seara’s fingers drew a small circle on my blanket, unconsciously mirroring the sideways eight Cassie had traced into my palm all day. Elias leaned forward, elbows on his knees, watching me the way he watches thunderstorms roll over hills—measuring, loving, braced for beauty.

They spoke almost at once, as though they’d been holding the truth between them for years.

“You were always our little princess,” Seara said, molten and sure. “From the moment you opened your eyes.”

“Always,” Elias echoed, cedar-soft. “There was never any other truth for us.”

Something fractured in me, sharp and bright, like sunlight breaking through stained glass. Breath dragged ragged in my chest. “Then why?” The word came out raw, salt-edged. “Why let me suffer that long? Why tutors and gardens and hiding? And after I changed—why didn’t you say anything? You knew. I knew you knew. You never sat with me. You didn’t help Lucien when we drifted. You just… acted like everything was normal while I felt alone with it.”

Seara’s hand slid to my cheek. Her thumb smelled faintly of rosemary and soap from the bath she’d given me. She didn’t flinch. “Because the spell itself was never meant to leave anyone remembering. It should have erased the you from before, even from us. But it didn’t. We remembered—and we were terrified telling you would make you believe you’d broken something, that there was something wrong with you. We didn’t want that fear planted in you. So we chose silence. We chose to treat you as only yourself, because you were. Because you always were.”

Elias’s fingers slipped into mine under the blanket, warm and blunt. “Your will made us remember. That wasn’t supposed to be possible. But it was your choice, your magic, your strength. We were grateful. And we thought if we never spoke of it, you would believe what we knew to be true: that you had always been Mira.” His mouth tightened, regret folding through. “We should have been more observant. We missed how badly you needed us to speak it aloud. We missed how badly Lucien needed help understanding it. We thought his distance was ordinary adolescence, not heartbreak. For that, I am sorry.”

My throat burned. “And all the lessons? The endless courts training?”

Seara’s hand shifted to my temple, her eyes blazing like mid-summer heat. “That was me, teaching you the only way I knew. Preparing you to be a woman strong enough for the Courts, because I knew they were coming for you sooner or later. Dance lessons, etiquette, strategy—it was never to make you something else. It was to sharpen the blade you already were. To make sure when they came, you wouldn’t break.”

Elias’s voice gentled. “And I fought for the other side. I wanted you among mortals, to be socialized as a girl with friends your own age, to live outside the shadow of politics. That’s why we let you attend Ravenrest. It was never about doubting who you were—it was about giving you both worlds. Seara’s training to endure the Court, my stubborn insistence on the mortal school to let you breathe as yourself.”

The words tangled inside me—hurt and love, silence and protection, all wound together. I thought of sneaking through the Firebrand archives with Lucien at my back, of whispering please, see me into salt and spell-light. I thought of waking after, the world matching my bones at last. And then the white silence that followed, when no one said a word about what we all knew.

“I felt alone,” I whispered. “Knowing you knew, and still pretending with you that you didn’t.”

Elias’s eyes shone. “We should have told you we remembered. We should have said thank you—for giving us the gift of knowing all your selves. We failed you in that. But we will not fail again.”

Seara bent and pressed her brow to mine, warmth and steel. “We will mend what our silence frayed. With you. With Lucien. Not as High Lady or City Councilman. As your mother and father.”

The room swelled too full—Cassie’s thumb tracing infinity in my palm, Lucien’s pink ears and fragile smile, Alina’s bright eyes, my parents’ fierce certainty. Relief didn’t flood. It thawed, slow and sure.

“I’m not all the way okay,” I admitted. “But I will be. And so will Lu.”

“Good,” Cassie murmured, fierce and steady. “Because I’ll make you eat protein if I have to duel your father for the spoon.”

My stomach answered before I could: a loud, mortifying growl. The Small Folk fox on the console sneezed glitter in offense. Heat shot to my face; Lucien barked a laugh; Alina clapped a hand over her mouth; Cassie smirked like she’d orchestrated it.

I groaned, half humiliated, half relieved by the normalcy of hunger. Pain tugged sharp in my ribs, reminding me of my edges.

Elias stood, voice slipping back into its warm, bossy cadence. “That settles it. Everyone downstairs. A broken family dinner: all of us. We’ll bring pillows, the good chair—you’ll lift nothing but your spoon.”

Seara kissed my temple, molten and sure. “I’ll walk with you.”

Cassie squeezed my hand. “I’ll hover and be insufferable about it.”

Lucien, awkward but brave, offered an elbow. “I’ll clear the stairs.”

Alina, cheeks pink, squared her shoulders. “I’ll make sure the mortal doesn’t break any fae furniture.”

The ache, the crown, the people: they all shifted into place like pieces finally deciding they fit. I let my head rest against Cassie for one last beat, breathed in, breathed out, and said to them, to the spell I had claimed, to the girl I had always been:

“Okay.”