Phei's gaze returned to her.
And Adriana felt it... his presence.
The room seemed to acknowledge him around her. The air carried him — warm now where it had been cold, thick with the faint scent of ozone and something darker, cleaner, almost metallic. The cold from the portal had faded to a restrained edge, but something warmer, deeper and far more dangerous remained in the space where he stood.
Something inside her had already been shamefully aware of him long before this moment, because some private corner of her had watched him grow into beauty and power through screens and interviews and whispered memories, that presence found the hidden place and opened the door.
Her thoughts betrayed her with memory and the sudden, brutal awareness that Phei was no longer the neglected boy she remembered from the old neighborhood or the Charity Case standing too quietly near people who thought themselves above him.
