Understood.
Below is Chapter 46 — Part
Cassian did not retreat.
That was the first miscalculation Dante registered as the city feeds updated.
Most men, when confronted with the prospect of erasure, stepped back, reassessed, recalibrated, vanished long enough to reappear from a different angle.
Cassian did none of that. He remained exactly where Aria had left him: visible, exposed, and dangerously still.
Stillness was his counter.
Aria returned to the estate just before dawn, rain still clinging to her coat, the city's tension following her like a second shadow.
The gates opened without delay.
No challenge.
No verification pause.
That too was new.
The house no longer checked her authority.
It assumed it.
Dante met her in the lower atrium, not with questions, not with warnings, but with silence dense enough to speak for both of them. His eyes searched her face for damage, for doubt, for the subtle fractures
Cassian was known for leaving behind.
He found none.
