[Lilia]

Truce.

The word felt like a heavy stone sitting at the bottom of my stomach. I’ve been replaying everything Ronan said to me earlier, his voice a jagged edge in the silence of my thoughts. He scares me—not in the way a monster in the dark might, but in the way a predator in a tailored suit does.

He is an avaricious pile of crap, and I know with every fiber of my being that I cannot trust him. Does my grandfather realize he has fostered a venomous snake under his roof? I ...