Nova's POV
"A third sister," Thorne said.
"Seraphine." Nova heard her own voice come out distant, like it belonged to someone standing a few feet away from her body. "She's the oldest. She was the one who taught Morgessa everything. In the history books she's listed as she disappeared three hundred years ago. Everyone assumed she was dead."
"Everyone assumed wrong," Ryder said.
The seal sat in his palm. Old wax, dark red, pressed with a crest that Nova had seen exactly once in her life in a book her mother had kept locked, the one she hadn't been allowed to read until she was older. The one that didn't exist anymore because the Moonstone Kingdom's library had burned with everything else.
She knew that crest.
She wished she didn't.
"What does the message say?" Thorne asked.
Ryder unfolded the letter.
He read it once silently. His face did something careful and controlled that told Nova everything before he said a word.
Then he read it out loud.
