"What… what did you do?"
Draven's eyes met hers, pale irises unreadable but steadfast. "What was always yours. I simply returned it."
Her mouth opened and closed, questions surging like a high tide against a breakwater— Why didn't you tell me? When did you discover the bloodline? What does it make me now? —but none of them found breath. They broke apart the instant her gaze lifted to the faint, precise curve that had settled on Draven's lips. The expression was almost an optical illusion: a suggestion of warmth without the heat, the brief catenary of satisfaction a chess-master shows only when every piece sits exactly where he predicted. She read the meaning in that slight tilt—knew it as surely as she felt the new pulse beneath her skin. He had prepared this outcome before she ever stepped onto the plateau. Every glance, every off-hand suggestion, every data-key he slid across a map table at midnight had been a stone laid in a road only he could see.
