Across the Palace, while Cassian and Rafael were tearing a desert apart, Cixi sat on the couch with her legs drawn up, the long afternoon light going gold across the floor.
She had given up waiting at the window. Cassian would come back when he came back, and her body had decided, somewhere in the last hour, that it would rather be horizontal about the whole thing. Her eyes drifted closed. She was almost under, in that warm sinking moment just before sleep, when a single thought reached up and yanked her back.
She had not witnessed a murder.
Her eyes snapped open.
