Raven's mouth found her ear.
"I'm claiming what's mine," he said.
Three words.
She felt them in her chest. In the specific hollow that eleven months of the Dalton family had carved there — the managing and the performing and the correct expressions and the letting go of what she wanted in favor of what was arranged — and she felt those three words fall into that hollow like they'd been shaped for it.
His eyes were at the edge of her peripheral vision. She turned to look.
That expression.
She'd seen his face in the pool footage. Seen it in the coffee shop encounter she'd turned over in her head more times than she'd admit. But this close — his face right there, the rain on his skin, those purple eyes not soft and not gentle but — certain, the specific quality of a person looking at something they have decided on completely, something that didn't require justification from external sources because the decision had been made internally and was final —
Something quivered.
