The rain fell soft and warm. The pack celebrated behind us. And for one perfect breath, standing in the rain I'd chosen, inside the walls I'd taken back, beside the king who wanted me when there was nothing left to want me for for one breath, everything was whole.
I had been thrown away.
And I had come home.
I let myself have that breath. I'd earned it. The girl in the mud had earned every second of it.
But even as Cain's arms closed around me in the warm rain, some old instinct stirred at the back of my mind the servant's instinct, the watchful one, the nobody who'd survived by reading every room. It had kept me alive on the bottom rung, and it had never quite gone quiet, and it stirred now, for no reason I could name, on the happiest night of my life.
Winning a war ends it, it seeme
