I stepped through it with Eva on my left and the other one on my right, both hands held, the bond pointing at both simultaneously — that single warmth arriving from two directions at once, same as it had been since the cathedral.
The room was the way I'd left it.
The people in it were not.
Liliana crossed the distance before I'd fully registered she was moving.
She didn't say anything immediately. Her hands went to my face first — both palms, framing it, her eyes moving across every visible part of me with the focused, systematic attention of someone who had spent two years training specifically so that the person in front of her would never look like this, and was processing the fact that they did anyway.
Then my ribs. My arms. The burn along my left shoulder from Austin's mana strike.
I let her look. There wasn't much point in doing otherwise.
"Who did this," she said.
