The villa let the day in like a question it already knew the answer to: slowly, deliberately, with an edge of calculation. Light pooled across the wide kitchen island in long, female slashes; the lemon trees in the courtyard cast small comet-shadows through the windows. It was a beautiful, ordinary afternoon—one the kind of people wrote about when they wanted readers to feel the calm before something broke.
I pretended it was ordinary.
I ate with one hand and kept the other fisted at my side, as if holding myself together was a physical action. My sandwich tasted suspiciously like safety, and every bite felt obscene because the crash had not been a dream. It had been a thing that happened to me, a physical violation that I still woke up to in the dark when my ribs flared and my mind tried to fill the space where I'd been shredded.
Upstairs, the house hummed. Not with music or voices but with the small, breathlike life of walls that had been known for centuries—the kind of presence that settled differently depending on the mood it shadowed. Villa Dahlia was quiet today in the way a wound was quiet: not healed, but avoiding sudden movement.
"Come on," Tiffany said, breaking the bubble. She was sitting on the other side of the counter, knees tucked up under her, sketchbook abandoned. She'd appropriated my favorite mug and was drinking tea like it was an offense. "You can stare at sunlight all you want, but if you don't eat you'll faint dramatically and then I'll have to explain to Conrad and Sera why you are sprawled on a marble floor."
I managed a humorless smile. "I'm not fainting. I already did that whole near-death thing—don't have credits for a sequel."
She choked on her tea and then laughed, the sound bright and younger than her years. "You're being dramatic. Which we like in small doses, Cass. Not in the 'dead-in-a-truck' variety, though. That one was- terrifying."
Conrad moved like he had always been arranged around our lives—soft-footed, precise. He wiped the rim of a glass with a linen and set it down as if he were smoothing time itself. "Would you like something lighter, Mr. Roan? Perhaps soup? The wound salve has been doing wonders but one must feed properly."
"You're not being funny today, Conrad," I said, which was a lie. Conrad could be funny. He did the world's smallest bow. "Soup would be an upgrade."
Tiffany snorted. "See? Conrad's on it. You're going to be fine. Also, if you ever get hurt again I will sulk for a month."
"You'll survive," I said, because she would. She always did.
The thing about the bond—about Sera's blood braided into mine—was that it was mostly a soundless thing and then, suddenly, a very loud thing. At first it had been flashes of sensation: the warmth of her when she sat too close, a whisper of jasmine and smoke, a phantom grip of fingers on my wrist. Now it folded into me more fully, like tide into sand, and small pulses of her state came through without warning. I could tell when she shifted from sleep to waking if I focused. During the day, when she slept, it was a slow, patient hum. Tonight it would be different.
"She's asleep," I said, too sharply. "She'll be up later."
"You sound like a child waiting for a candy store to open," Tiffany observed. Her tone was teasing, but the look in her eyes was careful—protective, the way she watched the two of us like she was cataloguing which of us ran the greatest risk.
I bristled, then softened. "Maybe I am. Maybe I just—" I swallowed. "I don't know how to be normal anymore."
"Normal is overrated," Tiffany said. "Also, you still call her by her name, 'Sera' sounds like a dinner reservation and not like the woman who rips your shirts off."
"Helpful," I muttered.
We ate. Conrad cleared plates with a choreography that made everything tidy. He never intruded. He smoothed, he served, he observed with the economy of someone who had long ago learned you didn't ask questions unless ordered.
After lunch I paced. I checked the driveway just to look at the new AMG Sera got me—black and patient, like a dangerous animal catching its breath—and then came back inside because pacing in the kitchen sounded more conspicuous than pacing on tarmac. Tiffany found me by the greenhouse, where tiny basil shoots were stubbornly pushing through the soil.
"You okay?" she asked, like a question and not a dare.
"I'm fine." Which was true in the narrowest sense. I was alive. I could breathe. My ribs still hurt but weren't broken. Sera had braided herself into me and I had not died. Those were the basics.
She cocked a brow. "You look like someone inventing an apology."
I snorted. "For what?"
"For letting Sera burn herself up for you without punching Mavier in the face," she said, and there it was—the name. It landed soft and then hot. We'd been careful with it since the ambulance and the hospital and the secret syringe trick. We were still picking our way through the pieces.
She grinned, and for a second she looked like she belonged to me the way she always had—less sister, more conspirator. "Promise me something."
"Name it."
"Promise me you won't try to joust a vampire prince with your bare hands. Promise me you'll call Sera babe later tonight."
My mouth opened, closed, opened again. "You're impossible."
"Call it sibling duty, you two are dating act like it." She nudged me with an elbow. "Also, if you call her babe and she laughs I will never let you forget it."
I imagined the scene—me, in the dining room, spoon clattering, calling her babe like it was a foreign coin. My palms pricked with sweat.
"Fine," I said. "I'll be dignified."
Tiff rolled her eyes. "Sure you will."
Hours did the slow work of afternoon—the sun drifted, certain and indifferent; Conrad reappeared with iced tea; I tried to read and failed twice. All day I was under the heat of it: the memory of being wrapped in steel and glass, the feel of motor oil and the smell of something that could have finished me. My muscles tensed at innocuous noises. Every sharp sound made me prepare for impact.
When evening arrived it was a quiet thing—shadows pooling, lights sliding into place, the house lowering itself in the way a predator crouches before a hunt. Sera was a nocturnal animal; she slept through sunlit hours like a ritual, waking when the world wore its black dress. Today, that ritual felt like a promise. Or maybe a threat.
Conrad announced dinner with the inevitability of a clock. The room filled slowly—Tiffany first with stubborn, adolescent energy, then me, still a little raw and awkward as always, and finally, the quiet sound I'd been holding my breath for: the soft click of glass when Sera opened the inner door.
She never moved like a person. She moved like weather shifting—slow, decisive, authoritative. The robe caught the light differently than expected; she had been asleep and now she was awake and the house changed with her like someone had turned a page. Her hair was brushed back, silk wrapped around her. She looked like she belonged on velvet, which was not a compliment you could ever really diminish.
At the table, conversation orbited like moths—Tiffany told a story about a disastrous driver at school, Conrad corrected a culinary fact, and I tried to carve out a space for myself.
Sera sat down as if she'd chosen the chair. She didn't smile right away. She observed. Her gaze landed on me and for a sliver of a second the room narrowed until all I could feel was the temperature of her attention. The bond answered like a guitar string struck and thrummed through my bones.
"Pass the salt, please," I said, because people pass salt at tables and in those small rituals you find normalcy.
For a beat the world misaligned. My mouth had settled into something else, a cadence I hadn't rehearsed. I didn't mean it to happen. It slipped out the way certain truths do when the air is suddenly thinner than you thought it was.
"Babe—" I started.
The fork stopped halfway to Sera's plate. Tiffany made a small sound that was half delight, half prophecy. Conrad's hands stilled with the careful servitude of someone who had seen declarations once or twice and could tidy them later.
Sera's eyes caught mine. She didn't laugh. She didn't scold. She lifted one brow and the smallest, most private smile ghosted across her face—an expression that might have been victory or mercy. It hit me like sun through glass: sharp and warming and a little blinding.
"You used a nickname?," she said, dry and amused. "Do you want the salt or are you delivering a confession?"
My face went something like crimson and something else—vulnerability, stupid and immediate.
"I—salt," I stammered, making the saleable move of a man who'd had the wind knocked out of him and now attempted dignity. "Pass the salt, babe—sorry—pass the salt, Sera?."
Tiffany whooped, delighted. "Oh my God, this is the content I live for."
Conrad, to his credit, handled the moment like a seamstress. He slid the salt across with a soft, "There you are, Mr. Roan," as if he'd been staging this exact tableau for years and it finally arrived at the correct act.
Sera let the smile settle into something warmer. She patted the table like a queen signaling a favored subject. "You're uncoordinated," she murmured, but not unkind. Her fingers brushed mine briefly as she took the salt—small, contained, a claim more than a gesture.
The rest of dinner was ordinary in the smallest and most miraculous sense. We talked about nothing of consequence: weather, a film Tiffany wanted to watch, Conrad's ridiculous insistence that a pinch of thyme could fix anything. I listened. I answered. When silence sat too long I reached across the table and found her hand. It was warm. It fit.
Later, once plates were cleared and the house breathed differently now that two of us were less anxious, Sera and I ended up in the kitchen again, washing dishes together like a married couple do in movies. She asked Conrad to let us clean up. Her hands were deft and quick; mine clumsy. In the small steam and clatter, she pressed a hand to the small of my back—an automatic move that steadied me.
"You'll have to stop acting like I'm gonna freak out about nicknames," she said, a tease threaded through it.
"You set that precedent," I answered.
She leaned down and kissed my throat—soft, private—and she whispered, "Babe, I like it."
I didn't need to promise. My fingers tightened on the dishcloth like they meant it enough to be a vow.
That night, when I laid in bed and the moon carried the villa's shadow across the ceiling, the world felt like one big, precarious and brilliant thing. The crash lived in one corner of that life like a bruise. The bond lived in another, fierce and luminous. Between them: Sera, whole and terrifying and chosen.
If anyone came for her—man, monster, a mad prince—I knew the answer in a way I hadn't known it before.
I would not step aside.