POV: Thalia
I told myself it was the cross-referencing that brought me to the east wing that morning. The rest of it — choosing to sit at the same table rather than have documents sent to the library — I watched myself do without quite naming it.
Caroline didn't ask why I'd come. She cleared space and handed me the relevant folder, and we spent the better part of the afternoon cross-referencing Sorcha's intelligence against pre-truce documentation without once discussing what we were actually doing. The most useful stretch of hours I'd had all week.
The garden held the last of the afternoon light by the time I stepped outside. Not a decision — just my feet taking me somewhere that wasn't a briefing room or a space where someone might need something from me.
Phoenix came through the gate without hesitation, dirt on her training clothes and a scrape along her forearm she hadn't bothered to address.
She dropped onto the bench beside me and looked at me the way she looks at everything she's trying to read — openly, without performing the effort.
"You've been in the east wing all day," she said, without any particular judgment in it. "Garrett mentioned it when I finished the afternoon run."
"Working with Caroline on Sorcha's files," I told her. "A lot to cross-reference."
"That long?" Phoenix raised an eyebrow. "That's a long time for cross-referencing."
"The material is dense," I said — true, not the whole truth — and Phoenix's expression told me she'd registered the gap without pushing on it yet.
"Caroline's good at working," Phoenix said eventually. "She doesn't make it feel like she's managing you while she does it." She paused. "Is that what you were doing? Working, or watching her work?"
"Both," I said — the most honest version I could offer without the part I wasn't ready to name.
Phoenix was quiet for a moment. Then: "She caught me after training the other day. I didn't go to her. She was just there, and I was already heading that direction before I decided to."
"I know," I said.
"Does that bother you?" she asked — not braced, just asking, the way she asked everything.
"It tells me you know where to go when you need something," I said. "That doesn't bother me. What it makes me feel is more complicated than bothered." I paused. "I'm still working out the words for it."
She was quiet for a moment with that, then: "Mom. I'm not replacing you with her."
"I know," I said. "Do you actually know, or are you saying it because you're supposed to?" she asked.
"I'm working toward actually knowing," I said. "The saying it is one of the ways I get there."
Phoenix looked at me with the clear-eyed assessment she'd been born with. "Okay," she said. "That's honest."
She settled back on the bench. "Can you come watch me train tomorrow? Not to check in with Garrett. Just to watch me — the way you used to, when it wasn't work yet."
"Yes," I said, and I meant it the way I meant things when I didn't put a qualifier on them. "Tomorrow. Just to watch."
Phoenix nodded once, satisfied, and settled further into the bench. I let myself stay too — not managing anything, not reaching for the next thing.
It was dark by the time I walked the south corridor toward the holding wing — not something I had planned when I left the garden.
I did it anyway, because the lockdown was real and there was one conversation I had been putting off for reasons I hadn't examined carefully enough.
The guard outside Lia's cell stepped aside without a word. I entered without one.
The cell was the kind of clean that happens when a person has stopped fighting their environment and started organizing it instead. A single lamp on the table.
Books arranged along the wall with the precision of someone who had run out of other problems to solve and turned that energy on the available surfaces.
Lia looked up from her chair. She'd known it was me before the door opened — sister's instinct, the same one that had made her a precise instrument of damage for a lifetime.
"You came alone," she said, studying me with the specific attention she'd always aimed like a tool. "That's different from every other time."
"The pack is at elevated alert," I told her. "I want to know if there's anything you haven't told us about the Coven's operational timeline."
"You already have Sorcha," Lia replied. "Whatever I knew, she knows more currently." She looked at me steadily. "That's not why you're here."
"Tell me what you think the reason is," I said, taking the chair across from her. "Since you're going to anyway."
"You're trying to decide something," she said. "You've been trying to decide it for a while. You come here when it gets loud enough." She tilted her head. "What is it this time?"
"Whether I made the right call keeping you here," I said. "Whether mercy was something I chose or something I performed because the pack was watching."
Lia was quiet for a moment. "It was both," she said. "You chose it and performed it. Those aren't mutually exclusive. You've always been better at that than I was." She looked at her hands. "I performed things I never chose. That's the difference between us."
The room was very still. Outside I could hear the compound running its evening rotation — the sounds I had stopped registering as unusual.
"They're coming soon," I said, keeping my voice level. It wasn't a question, and we both knew I wasn't asking her to confirm it.
Lia held my gaze without confirming it and without denying it, which was an answer in the particular language we'd always had — sisters who grew up in the same house learning the same silences.
"Whatever you're deciding," she said finally, "decide it before tomorrow. You won't have the same room to think in." She looked back at her books. "That's all I'll give you."
I stood at the door for a moment. Neither of us had anything left worth performing.
I had come for a fight.
For the sister who had spent many years learning every soft place I had and keeping the coordinates in her head — the one who would push until I pushed back, who would give me a reason to walk out of this cell clean about keeping her in it.
That was the version of her I knew how to meet. That was the version I had rehearsed all the way down the corridor.
Lia was letting the silences stay silent, which she had never done in all our years as sisters. That alone should have told me something was already in motion. Looking back later, I would place the moment here — the too-calm hands, the books already organized as though she had made peace with the room she was about to leave. The Coven had a plan for her extraction, and she knew it was coming. I did not ask, because asking would have given her the leverage of refusing to answer.
She looked the same. She sounded the same. But she was letting the silences between us stay silent, and for as long as we'd been sisters, she had never once done that.
She had filled every quiet moment with a jab designed to land — a name, a memory, a correction aimed at the part of me she knew would flinch. Tonight she was letting the quiet sit where it was. Tonight she was not reaching.
"Thalia," she said, without looking up. Not my title. My name. "You were always going to win this one."
I didn't answer. I closed the door behind me and stood in the corridor with the specific weight of something I couldn't resolve.
The compound was still running its rotation outside. The war was still coming, and would not be permitted to wait while I sorted out what I'd just witnessed in that room. Both of those things were true at the same time.