The vial was smaller than I expected.
I turned it over between my fingers, watching the liquid catch the light from my bedroom window — pale, almost golden, innocent-looking for something that could bring a man like Varder to his knees. I had expected it to look more like what it was. Something dark and obvious. Something that matched the weight of what I was about to do.
But poison never advertised itself. That was the point.
A mistake.
The word surfaced again, the way it had been surfacing for days now, bobbing up through everything — through sleep, through meals, through every moment I had to stand in the same room as him and arrange my face into something neutral.
It was a mistake, Hazel.
I had replayed it so many times the memory had worn grooves into me. The way he had looked at me afterward, already pulling away, already reconstructing the distance between us like he could simply decide it hadn't happened. Like I was something he could file under error and move on from.
