Nova's POV
Seraphine arrived at breakfast.
Not through the gate. Not through the garden wall. Through the kitchen door, the way anyone arrived who had been in a building long enough to know where the actual entrance was, carrying a cup of something hot that she had apparently made herself, nodding at Danna in the way of two people who had met before.
Danna, to her considerable credit, nodded back and continued with the bread.
Nova looked at her great-aunt across the kitchen.
Three hundred years. The last queen of the Moonstone line before her mother. The woman who had held Nova's ancestral magic for sixteen years and waited, with the patience of someone who had been waiting for much longer than that, for the right moment to return it.
The woman who had not told Nova any of this when she'd had the chance.
"You lied," Nova said.
