Seren had come to the garden alone in the cool of the evening.
Not because she had forgotten the rules.
But because she needed five minutes to remember she still existed outside the bond, outside the weight of three alphas who felt every hitch in her breath, outside the palace that had begun trying to kill her the moment she stopped being invisible.
She thought of her mother and her best friend Lysa. "Oh, how I missed them." She muttered under her breath.
She slipped out through the servants' door behind the east wing, past the laundry lines heavy with wet linen, past the refuse pits that smelled of rotting roses and yesterday's wine. The moon was three-quarters full, silvering the gravel so it looked like frost under her slippers. The air carried late-blooming damask, damp earth after the afternoon shower, and the faint iron bite of the river miles away.
