Page 84 of Shadowed

He's always been able to read me. Before I could read locks, Marcus could read me.

"What happened?"

"I left." I step inside. The flat is warm. Clean. Elena's books on the shelf—real books, bound, not the water-stained copies she used to steal from the lending library. Tommy's drawings on the wall. The smell of a meal someone cooked, not scrounged.

"Left how?" Marcus closes the door. His eyes are on my hands—the shadow-marks crawling past my wrists, darker than they were when he last saw me, the patterns shifting in the warm light. "Lilith. Left how?"

I sit at the table. The kitchen table, good wood, another provision. I put my hands flat on the surface and I tell him.

Not everything. He's sixteen. There are things a sixteen-year-old does not need to know about what happened between his sister and a seven-hundred-year-old Fae prince on a stone floor in the dark. But the debt. The blood claim. The bond, in terms he can understand—a connection, a tie, something that links me to Shadow Court and its prince. The file.

I tell him about the file.

"He engineered it." My voice is flat. The fencing voice. "Father's crime. Our poverty. The years of stealing. All of it planned. He manufactured our suffering so that when he came to collect, I'd be exactly what he needed."

Marcus is quiet. He sits across from me at the table and his hands—larger than mine now, when did that happen—wrap around a teacup and he's quiet for a long time.

"He was good to us," he says. Carefully. The way you set down something fragile.

"He engineered our suffering so I'd be useful to him."

"I know." Marcus turns the teacup. "Both things, Lily."

Both things. I look at my brother—sixteen, proper coat, fed, warm, educated. A boy who was eating spoiled bread and sleeping in a leaking flat two years ago. A boy who broke his arm and screamed while I set it with a chair leg. A boy who's now sitting at a good table drinking tea from a cup that matches and wearing a coat that fits because a Fae prince decided his sister's suffering had been sufficient.

"The coat is still warm," Marcus says. "Elena's still reading. Tommy slept through the night for the first time in years." He meets my eyes. He has my eyes—green, our mother's. "I don't know what to do with both of those things being true."

I don't know either.

Elena comes in from the bedroom. Fourteen, sharp faced, already reading something—always reading, the girl who taught herself Latin from a stolen grammar when she was nine. She looks at me. Looks at Marcus. Looks at the shadow-marks on my arms.

"You're back," she says. Not a question. An assessment.

"I'm back."

"For how long?"

I don't have an answer. Elena nods—the nod of someone who expected exactly that—and goes to make tea.

She returns with the pot and two cups. Pours with the precision of someone who has watched rationing, learned waste. She sits across from me. The lamplight catches her face—sharper than it was three months ago, or maybe I'm sharper now, noticethings differently. Her eyes track the shadow-marks, the way they crawl past my wrists and disappear under my sleeves.

"Are you eating?" she asks. Not "Where were you?" or "What did he do to you?" Just that. The question that cuts through all of it.

I consider lying. She's fourteen. But she's also Elena, and Elena sees into cracks the way I pick locks.

"Not enough," I admit.

She nods once—assessment complete—and pours tea. The kind she always makes when things are wrong: strong, with honey. She has to stretch to reach the honey pot, still small for her age, but her movements are efficient. No wasted motion. Everything she does is a tool. She learned that from me, watching her. Before Shadow Court. In the rookeries, we taught each other to be useful when the world wanted us to break.

"Marcus has been saving the good bread for when you came back," she says. Handing me the cup. "He didn't say that, but I noticed the ration changes. He started taking the worse portions." She settles back in her chair. "You need to eat it."

"Elena—"

"You're thin. Not as thin as before, which is interesting. But lighter than when you left." Her eyes flick back to the marks. "And those are pulling something from you. I can see it in your shoulders."

I stare at my sister. Fourteen years old. A girl who learned to read by stealing books. A girl who was so undernourished last year that her periods stopped for six months. A girl who is now sitting across from me and reading my body like it's another language she decided to understand.

"Tea first," she says. "Then you sleep. Then we'll talk about the eating."