"You have until the end of lunch," Donna Sylvia said pleasantly. "There's no rush."
She picked up her fork again, and the small talk resumed as if the conversation had never happened, and Mara sat across from her and thought very carefully about what surviving cost, and whether she'd already been paying it this whole time without realising.
She was still weighing her options when she heard the sound of approaching footsteps.
These weren't the steady, distant steps of the groundskeeper. These were different… deliberate and moving across the lawn at a hurried pace, as if the person had somewhere important to be.
Donna Sylvia heard them too. Her eyes moved to the garden path, just briefly, and something shifted in her expression that she didn't quite manage to smooth away in time.
Nico stepped into the gazebo.
