KNOX’S POV
Ember falls asleep mid-sentence.
One moment she is saying something about the cousin, and the next her voice goes soft and trailing, and her breathing evens out, and she is gone, just like that, the way only someone running on nothing can sleep.
Like a light switching off.
I lie there in the dark and listen to her breathe.
The Sovereign settles around us the way it always does at this hour—the old beams contracting in the cold, the distant rush of the gorge echoing far below.
I know every sound this house makes. I catalogued them on the nights I couldn’t sleep after moving from Zruch. After my dad died.
After I killed him.
Back then, memorising those noises was the difference between a bad night and a worse one.
It was how I learned to tell the difference between the ho
