#Chapter 106 What the Bond Knows

Kaine Something is wrong, and it's circling closer, and I can't name it. I've felt it for days—a pressure at the edge of the bond, like a word on the tip of my tongue that won't come. When I hold Ember's daughter, Rafe goes still and intent in a way he does for nothing else in the world, and when Ember catches me looking at the baby, her face does something frightened she smooths away a beat too late. The Queen has taken a sudden, poisonous interest in a captain's child, and Ines does nothing without a reason. I sit up late in my study turning it over, landing on the same stone and stepping off it, because I don't want to see what's underneath. The child has dark eyes—my eyes, my father's eyes, the eyes of my line, and Robert is fair. Look at it, Rafe says, and the fact that he speaks this plainly at all tells me how far past patience he's come. You keep turning away. Look at the thing you're turning away from. I don't, because if I pick up that stone then Ember didn't just h