_Rowena’s POV_

We were two minutes from the Varkos gates when Celeste’s driver suddenly slowed.

I looked up from my phone.

A black limousine was parked along the road just outside the estate entrance, long and clean and completely still. Two men stood outside it in dark suits, and even from the car I could see they weren’t staff. The way they stood, the way their eyes moved, these were trained people. Security, serious and unhurried.

“Celeste,” I said.

“I see it,” she said.

The rear window of the limo came down.

I went still at the sight of the people inside.

My grandfather’s face appeared in the window.

Eighty-one years old, silver-haired, with the particular quality of stillness that came from a man who had spent decades being the most powerful person in most rooms and had stopped needing to perform it. Beside him, just visible, was my grandmother, she was smaller, softer in appearance, with eyes that missed nothing.

They had actually come themselves.

I had not expected that. I had thought maybe a message, a representative, or even a formal acknowledgment through Celeste’s channels.

Not the two of them, in person, parked outside the Varkos estate at noon on the day after my dissolution, waiting.

I got out of the car before the driver fully stopped.

My grandfather had his door open by the time I reached the limo. He stepped out and looked at me.

I had not seen him in almost two years. I had stayed away from the family, all of them, because I thought it would protect Kaelen’s standing. I understood now how foolish that had been.

How much I had given up for a man who was not giving anything up for me.

My grandfather put both hands on my shoulders.

He looked at me the way grandparents look at you when they are checking that you are fundamentally intact and are trying not to show how worried they have been.

“Ro,” he called out.

My throat tightened. I pressed my lips together and nodded.

He pulled me in and held me for a moment, brief, firm, the embrace of a man who had not done enough of this and knew it.

My grandmother appeared at his side and took my hand between both of hers without speaking. She didn’t need to. The grip said everything.

I turned back to Celeste’s car. “Velvet.....”

“Go,” Celeste said, already stepping out. “I’ll follow with the cars. Velvet will ride with me.”

Velvet appeared at the window. “I’ll make sure everything arrives safely, my Luna.” She paused. Then, quietly: “Go home.”

I nodded and got into the limo.

The escort was not subtle.

Two vehicles ahead of us, two behind, all of them moving with ease.

The city moved around us and seemed to register the convoy the way it registered weather, something you adjusted to without questioning the source.

“Your family has resources,” Kyra said, with the slightly awed tone she used when something impressed her against her will.

“They always did,” I said. I just spent three years pretending I didn’t come from them.

Never again.

My grandmother held my hand the entire drive and talked about small thing, the garden at the Ashthorne estate, a renovation to the east sitting room, my grandfather’s ongoing argument with his physician about his diet. Normal things. Deliberately normal, I understood, because she was giving me time to decompress before we arrived and everything became ceremonial again.

My grandfather sat across from us and watched me the way he always had, quietly, taking stock, updating whatever internal assessment he kept of the people he loved.

“The title,” he said, at one point. “Alaric handled it well.”

“You knew,” I said.

A slight pause. “We were informed.”

“You spoke to Alaric?” I was shocked.

“Celeste spoke to Alaric,” he said. “We simply confirmed that the family would receive you appropriately.”

I looked at him.

“You should have come to us sooner,” he said. Not a reprimand. A statement of fact with something heavier underneath it.

“I know,” I said.

He nodded once and looked out the window.

The Ashthorne estate came into view and I had to breathe through the feeling it produced. something between relief and grief and the particular ache of returning to a place that has existed in your memory unchanged while everything else moved.

The house looked the same.

Someone had set off firecrackers.

The sound hit us as the limo turned through the gates, a cascading burst of it, bright and sharp, echoing off the front of the house. I saw the staff lined along the path.

Celeste was already out of her car and moving toward me before I had fully stepped out of the limo. She took both my hands and looked at me with the expression she only ever showed in private,all the calculation gone, just Celeste, her eyes bright.

“Welcome home,” she said.

I couldn’t answer that. I just squeezed her hands.

The staff applauded. Someone shouted something celebratory from the back of the crowd that made three people laugh. My grandmother was already being helped toward the front door by one of the household staff. My grandfather stood at the foot of the steps and watched me with the quiet satisfaction of a man whose family had come back to where it belonged.

Two bedruption came an hour later.

I was upstairs in what would be my room — the east bedroom my mother had always kept ready for me, now freshly painted and smelling of new linen — when I heard the commotion from the front drive.

Velvet appeared in the doorway. “Your aunt Grace is here.”

I closed my eyes briefly. “Of course she is.”

Grace had always been the family’s most efficient information gatherer. She was my mother’s younger sister by eleven years, young enough to have missed most of the generation’s grief and old enough to have strong opinions about everything that came after. She was not malicious exactly. She was just perpetually interested in things that weren’t her business and had never developed the restraint to manage that interest quietly.

I found her in the entrance hall with Celeste, who was doing the particular kind of polite smiling that meant she had already said no twice and was preparing for a third.

“Rowena.” Grace turned to me immediately. “I need to speak with you.”

“Hello, Auntie Grace.”

“Don’t hello me. What happened? Celeste won’t say anything.” She looked at me with the focused energy

“Why did you agree to the divorce? Was it really your idea? And what did Alaric......?”

“Auntie Grace.” I kept my voice patient. “I’m home. I’m well. Everything is handled. I’m not going to debrief you in the entrance hall.”

“I’m not asking for a debrief, I’m asking......”

“The same thing,” Celeste said pleasantly.

Grace turned on her. “And you. You arranged all of this and didn’t tell anyone in the family......”

“I told the people who needed to know,” Celeste said.

“I’m family......”

“You’re also the reason Grandma Alice knew within forty-eight hours that Rowena was planning to leave,”

Celeste said, in a tone that was still pleasant and had stopped being warm. “So.” And it was the truth. She suspected Alice already knew before coming that day. Someone must’ve snitched.

Grace opened her mouth. Closed it.

She turned back to me with the slightly desperate energy of someone who had lost the argument and was trying to find a different door. “I just want to know......

She reached for my arm.

I was tired. Genuinely, deeply tired in the specific way of someone who had been operating at high alert for weeks and had only just arrived at a place where they could stop.

Kyra had gone quiet, not watchful-quiet, resting-quiet, the first real rest she’d allowed herself in longer than I wanted to calculate.

It happened fast.

Grace’s hand caught my wrist at the wrong angle , not with force, not intentionally, just the awkward grab of someone reaching urgently in the wrong direction.

There was a sharp twist, my wrist bending back.

Pain shot up my arm.

I made a sound I hadn’t planned to make.

Grace’s face went white. “Rowena — I didn’t mean — “

I held my wrist against my chest. It wasn’t serious — I could already tell that much. But with Kyra resting and my defenses down after weeks of being permanently braced for something, it had landed harder than it should have.

Celeste was beside me immediately.

“I’m fine,” I said. “It’s fine.”

But my eyes were stinging, and that had nothing to do with the wrist.

It was just the last thing, on top of everything else, on the day I had finally come home.

Grace stood in the entrance hall looking horrified and small, and I looked at her and felt nothing except tired.

“Go home, Auntie Grace,” I said quietly. “Please.”

She went.