LOGIN~Selene's POV~The visit has run thirty minutes without either of them announcing it, the unspoken extension settling over the apartment the way these small expansions have started to settle lately, unremarked and undeniable once you noticed them.Miriam takes both twins into the other room not long after Caden arrives, something about wanting to try the new mobile Petra brought over, though Selene suspects the mobile is mostly an excuse. Miriam has been doing this more often these past weeks, finding small, plausible reasons to give Selene and Caden a stretch of time alone together, never commenting on it, never asking what, if anything, happens during it.This is the first time they have actually been alone since Selene left Cresthaven.Caden sits where he usually sits, the chair near the mat, though there is no mat to sit near today, just the two of them and the quiet apartment and the particular weight of a silence that has nowhere left to hide behind a child's presence.Selene do
~Selene's POV~The twins reach five months on a Tuesday, and Selene marks it the way she has marked every month since arriving in Silvermere, with a small private ritual no one else has ever seen, not even Miriam, who she suspects knows it exists but has never once asked about directly.Lior has discovered the mechanics of rolling, and he pursues the activity with the same loud, opinionated energy he brings to everything else in his small life. He flips himself over on the mat with a grunt of effort and immediate triumph, then reaches for whatever happens to be within range, a rattle, the corner of a blanket, once memorably the leg of the coffee table, which he gripped with both hands as though it personally owed him something he intended to collect that afternoon.Asha studies everything with a stillness no five-month-old should reasonably have. She watches faces more than objects, tracking conversations across the room with an attention that has started to unsettle people who don't
~Caden's POV~Fenwick arrives at Pack Hall believing it a routine check, the kind of brief meeting that happens periodically with mid-rank Gammas whose rotation assignments are due for review. He sits across from Caden's desk with the easy posture of a man who has nothing in particular to be nervous about.Caden does not start with questions.He places the financial records on the desk between them, sliding the folder across without opening it himself, and says nothing while Fenwick reaches for it out of simple curiosity, the way anyone would.Fenwick opens the folder.Caden watches the progression happen across his face in stages, the way it almost always happens with people who have spent weeks convincing themselves they were careful enough not to get caught. First confusion, genuine and unguarded, his eyes scanning the page without yet understanding what he's looking at. Then comprehension, slower, the numbers beginning to mean something specific instead of abstract. Then a brief d
~Selene's POV~She sets the phone down on the counter and stands there a moment, not moving, listening to the particular quality of silence that follows a call like that.The twins are already asleep. Miriam went to bed twenty minutes ago, leaving the kitchen light on for her the way she always does, a small consideration Selene has stopped thanking her for out loud because they both understand it without needing the words. The apartment holds the late-evening stillness that has become its own kind of comfort over the past ten months, the particular hush of a home where everyone breathing in it is finally, currently, safe.She thinks about his voice.Not what he said. The words themselves had been simple enough, almost clinical, the kind of report a man gives when he has rehearsed exactly how much to say and stopped himself precisely at the line. What she keeps turning over is the sound underneath the words, the deliberate neutrality of someone who has trained himself, carefully and a
~Caden's POV~Conrad lays three names on the desk, each printed on its own slip of paper, the way Conrad always presents findings when he wants Caden to look at each one individually before letting them blur together into a single conclusion."One senior captain," Conrad says, tapping the first slip. "One mid-rank Gamma, name of Fenwick. One logistics clerk who handles the rotation schedules before they go out to the captains for distribution."Caden looks at all three names without picking any of them up. "Walk me through it.""The incursion timing doesn't work as coincidence. Not twice, not with this kind of precision. Three coordinated points, both times, both times landing inside gaps that only existed because of exactly how the rotation happened to fall that particular week. That's not luck. That's someone reading our internal schedule and passing it along before we've even finalized it ourselves.""How many people see the schedule before it's finalized?""Counting senior staff,
~Selene's POV~He arrives Thursday at the exact hour he named.She notes this without remarking on it, the way she notes most things about him now, filing it into the ongoing record she keeps without ever calling it a record out loud, even to herself. The border held, then. He kept the promise he was careful never to fully make, the one phrased as a likelihood rather than a guarantee, and she had noticed that carefulness too, the deliberate gap he leaves between what he says and what he commits to.She opens the door. He steps into the hallway and waits, the same waiting he has done at every threshold for going on three weeks now, neither advancing nor retreating, simply present at the edge of the space until she decides how much of it to give him.She steps back to let him in.Miriam is in the kitchen with the radio on low, some quiet talk program neither of them is really listening to. The twins are both awake. Lior is already loud about something on the play mat, working himself in
~Caden’s POV~Four months.Four months since she walked out of this building and I have done nothing but work, manage, control, and refuse to think about the precise way she looked when the bond broke — the colour that left her face, the sound she didn't quite manage to suppress.I spin my phone sl
~Selene’s POV~The café is called something she doesn't register until she is already inside.She had not planned to stop. The morning had been a coordination assignment — a follow-up call with Bea at Meridian about a charity luncheon scheduled for the following week, forty-seven guests this time,
~Caden’s POV~The report arrives at half past eight in a folder so thin it seems insufficient for what it contains.Marcus, his lead financial analyst, sets it on the desk without ceremony and stands back with the posture of a man who has delivered difficult news before and has learned not to stand
~Selene’s POV~The firm is called Meridian Events.She finds it the same way she found Dr. Amara Osei methodically, without urgency, working through a list she has built from the city's business directory and two careful hours of cross-referencing. Meridian is mid-sized. Not the largest operation i







