Cambria's heart thundered. She stared at the man cloaked in shadow, the man who had haunted her thoughts for a decade. Lucien Vale. Her father. Her curse.
He stepped forward, slow and deliberate, as though time bowed before his presence. Nothing about him had changed not the cold steel in his eyes, nor the way he commanded the air around him. He was a storm-made flesh.
"I asked you a question," he said, voice smooth and dangerous. "Are you ready to choose a side?"
Cambria's lips parted, but no sound came out. Her thoughts spiraled, colliding with memories long buried.
Lucien Vale had been declared dead when she was sixteen. A plane crash, they'd said. No survivors. But even back then, something had felt...off. Her mother's silence. Evelyn's sudden ascension. The sealed files. The disappearance of everything Cambria had once called truth.
And now, here he was not just alive, but watching, waiting.
"How?" she finally rasped. "How are you alive?"
