Page 337 of Scarlet Wars
All the while, Stephen’s body lay untouched.
It wasn’t until the fifth day after we’d killed off the United Chiefs, tempers cooled enough for us to even consider holding a funeral, a real one, for the only father figure I’ve ever known.
Caden, Emma, and Sean had portaled to Crown the day before to bury Saoirse, and although I didn’t ask how it went, the grim, shuttered look on Emma’s face when they returned told me more than any explanation ever could.
I kept my distance, knowing that whatever she’d faced there, whatever grief she was carrying, Caden would be the one to hold her together… If she let him, which was always the question with her.
I forced myself to turn away from all of it, from everything I couldn’t fix, and focused instead on the funeral still waiting for us.
My relationship with Stephen had been strained ever since his revelations in Switzerland. Him choosing to trust Caden over me, to have Sean experiment on the woman I loved, hurting her, abducting her. To twist and weaponize our bond like it was some kind of game. All to manipulate me into falling for someone who was never supposed to end up with me.
It had left me unwilling to reconnect with him before he died.
Still, despite everything, the years beforemattered.
They mattered when I was a scared kid with no one and nothing, and he stepped in. They mattered every time he stood behind me in training, pushing me harder because he believed I could be something more. They mattered because, for a while, he was the only person who ever looked at me like I was worth saving.
For better or for worse, Stephen had been the one constant in a world that kept shifting underneath me. And now, he was gone.
That kind of emptiness didn’t simply sit in my chest. It settled in my bones like frost.
And it hurt.
I was locked inside my room, an hour before his funeral, when a knock shattered the silence I’d wrapped myself in. Pulled me out of the spiral I couldn’t seem to crawl out of.
“It’s open.”
I half-expected Emma. Or maybe even Caden.
But it was Cara Sinclair standing there instead.
She wore all black. Clean lines, minimal distractions. Her hair was pulled back tight, drawing all the focus to the high angles of her cheekbones, the tension in her jaw, the mouth that never smiled without a reason.
She looked exhausted. Like someone who hadn’t slept in a week. Like someone who’d seen too much and carried all of it in the stiff set of her shoulders.
Haunted. Dangerous.
And fucking beautiful.
I hated that I noticed.
Hated how my eyes kept tracking the curve of her mouth, how some reckless part of me kept wondering what it would take to pull that tight composure apart.
Because even as my head screamedenemy, something deeper—something buried and stupid and human—wanted to feel what it would be like to be near her. To want her.
And that, more than anything, pissed me off.
She lingered in the doorway, one hand still resting on the frame like she wasn’t sure whether to step inside or back away.
I didn’t bother hiding my irritation. “What do you want?”
She blinked, then offered a faint, forced smile. “Nice to see you too.”
I sat back in my chair, arms crossed. “I’m sorry, were you under the impression you and I were on speaking terms?”
Her smile faltered, eyes narrowing slightly before something more vulnerable slipped through. “No. I guess I wasn’t.”
A beat of silence passed.
