SILAS POV
The moment Helena turned toward me through the glass, something inside me that had been tearing itself apart for three years locked into place with such violent clarity that my breath stalled. She looked the same and nothing like the same, the girl I had lost and the woman she had become layered together in a way I had never earned the right to see. There was a softness in her cheeks that motherhood had carved there, and a tiredness under her eyes that made my chest seize, yet she still carried the same impossible light she always had, the one I had crossed half a continent trying to reclaim before madness swallowed me whole.
The man who had been about to kiss her—my mate—should thank every god in existence that he was human, because if he had been anything else, Seiryu and I w
