CIAN
I sat at my desk, fingers steepled beneath my chin. The study felt too quiet. Too still. I could not shake the weight of what Fia had told me earlier.
Fleshcraft.
The word kept circling back. Her grandmother was experimented on. Her mother escaped Valentine's lab only to end up married to a man who broke her down piece by piece. And Fia, the result of all that pain and horror, carried guilt like it was hers to bear.
She was not a product of fleshcraft, though. That much I knew. Whatever experiments Valentine ran on her grandmother and mother, they had not been the direct cause of Fia's birth. She was conceived naturally. Born naturally. The fleshcraft connection existed only through a wicked man's touch. It was not trauma passed down like an inheritance no one wanted.
