Tauram's speculation turned Esmera cold like a rain shower soaking into her clothes. Implication burdened his words, even if she couldn't grasp it, even if he was reluctant to speak it.

Silence encased them. Esmera wanted to shatter it with her words as a hammer would, but what could she say?

She was Esmera Castignani nèe Nicholas, barista and marriage deserter, not this magical baby who had somehow single-handedly outwitted her family's murderer. All the same, she couldn't deny the tiny, selfish part of her that wanted to be this person who had defied the fate that confronted her.

This girl, wherever she was now, would be beautiful and powerful. She would be a heroine, not a battered wife who could barely scrape by most days.

Esmera would've told Tauram how wrong he was in his suspicions if her mouth would only cooperate with her.

Before it could regain its function, Tauram fired a question Esmera's way. "What is your name?"

She held his intense gaze even as her stomach swooped like a bird of prey inside her. "Esmera."

Tauram's eyes went so wide that Esmera was afraid they'd pop out of his perfect face.

Esmera blinked. She had not just thought his face was perfect, not in the middle of her identity crisis.

Tauram ran his fingers through his hair. As bleak as the light passing through the window was, they glimmered off the black strands shuffling at his touch.

Shaking his head, Tauram sank back in his chair. Esmera studied him.

He was in a room with a wildcat who spoke to him in hisses and purrs. He had heard about a lark bringing enchanted presents to a random girl, but it was the identity of said girl that caused his suspension of disbelief to give way.

A violent exclamation exploded from Tauram. Esmera somehow understood the foreign sounds to mean "Jilhari, great mother of bastard tigers".

Esmera wondered who Jilhari was and whether bastard tigers were a thing, but Lundas drew her attention away from her irrelevant questions with his purr that somehow sounded like a triumphant laugh.

"Now, don't get too ahead of yourself." Tauram flicked the cat's ear in his typical light-hearted manner, but his hand quivered, the movement so slight that Esmera might not have noticed it if she wasn't watching him so closely.

She looked away. He was just a man and an infuriating one at that. She must've imagined the mesmerising grace in every flutter of his fingers and the power contained in every sweep of his arms.

"What do you know about your family?" Tauram looked up at Esmera, his face as pale as if a dish of water had diluted its colour.

Esmera's shoulders slumped as she turned back to the fire. It flickered with a life of its own. She had never noticed before that blue edged the orange flames. "Nothing."

Tauram was silent behind her, as was the rest of the room except for Esmera's deep sigh.

"I was abandoned on a stranger's doorstep as a baby. After that, I bounced between orphanages and foster homes."

Esmera peeked back at Tauram. He nodded, so like a king that he made his chair look like a throne. Clarity was crystallising in his eyes. Whatever he had realised, he wasn't sharing it with her just yet.

She jumped as the wildcat at Tauram's feet gave a shrill purr. She had forgotten he was there. How could she not, when his master demanded all the attention she had to give?

Tauram rolled his eyes, more a cheeky prince than a king now. "Fine, fine, you were right! If Esmera is an orphan and the lark has been sneaking out of Milatanur to see her, it must mean she's a Finnaz."

The cat gave a teasing purr. Either Esmera was starting to imagine things or she had been around Lundas long enough to differentiate between his tones of voice. She had no idea which possibility scared her more.

Tauram swatted at the cat. Lundas shrunk back into the shadows, beyond his master's reach.

"Don't be silly, Lundas. I've only just met her." When Tauram met Esmera's eyes, colour flooded his cheeks. Maybe even more colour than had been there before.

Esmera looked away, blinking. Hearing things was normal for her. Seeing things was not.

Countless questions flitted through her mind. Having grown tired of being spoken about but not to, she asked the most nagging of them aloud. "What's a Finnaz?"

Tauram had spoken the word with a reverence that Esmera wasn't used to being directed at her. It had only intrigued her. Did "Finnaz" refer to social status, a family or an occupation? Or something else entirely?

Tauram's gaze held her in place as if she was a bird who might flutter away at any moment. "House Finnaz was a noble family from western Milatanur."

The familiarity of the detail sent goosebumps through Esmera. It sounded like something she had heard before, maybe in a TV show or from one of the orphans she used to know.

So ravenous was her curiosity that she was hardly aware of the next question leaving her lips. "What happened to them?"

Esmera fancied she knew how their story ended: with the beginning of hers, with a baby discarded on a doorstep, but she wasn't sure whether it was her overactive imagination inserting her into a story where she didn't belong or some repressed memory struggling to free itself.

Even worse, she wasn't sure which she wanted it to be.

The clouds that covered Tauram's face were darker than those layering the sky outside. "Everyone on the Finnaz estate was murdered, nobles and servants alike. Lord Hudion died fighting. So did his sons, young as they were. It's believed Lady Yandriya was killed with her baby daughter in her arms, but the child's body was never found. Everyone assumed it was burned to ashes or discarded somewhere outside of the estate."

Esmera flinched to hear a baby referred to in that way, to imagine enduring such an atrocity. Bile rose in her throat at the thought of that baby being her.

Her terror must've shown on her face because Tauram's voice softened just like petals before the flower burst into bloom. "I'm sorry. That was a harsh way to put it."

"I should be the one apologising." Esmera shook her head. "I'm sorry, but you have the wrong girl."

There was no way she was the missing daughter of a lord and lady in this wondrous hidden kingdom she had only heard of today. Only in books did unwanted orphans discover they were the sole survivors of violent massacres, and Esmera wasn't in a book. Her marriage would've had a happy ending if she was.

It had been unkind of Tauram to lead her to believe that she could be the Finnaz girl, but she didn't blame him. He believed it himself if the frantic look in his eyes was any indication.

"How old are you, Esmera?"

She frowned as she leaned against the mantelpiece, holding Tauram's gaze. "23."

"Listen..." Tauram leaned forward in his chair.

There was a conspiratorial edge to his voice as he spoke as if he had a secret to tell. More likely he wanted to lure Esmera in with an air of intimacy. Some men were experts in that, as she knew.

"The only way we'll discover the truth is if we return to Milatanur, but I think the evidence is in favour of you being the last Finnaz." Tauram counted each point on his elegant fingers as he listed it. "You're the same age as the Finnazes' daughter, you're an orphan with no knowledge whatsoever of your birth family, and you have the same name as their daughter."

Esmera went still. Her name wasn't common. She had never met anyone who shared it. Even when she searched the internet for its origin in a pointless attempt to glean some information about her family, she had come across precious little.

"Esmera" had been scrawled on the slip of paper left with her on that doorstep all those years ago. That was the one detail she knew about herself, the one shadow of her past. If there was any part of Esmera's former life that might've followed her into this one, it was her name.

Which could only mean one thing.

"It all fits in with each other." Tauram's voice sounded distant, in contrast to Esmera's pulsating thoughts.

She hated that she agreed with him because she didn't know what being the Finnaz family's lost daughter would mean for her.

Maybe it would transform her life until she didn't recognise it or herself. Maybe it wouldn't change anything, and Esmera would return to work tomorrow, serving people coffee without them being aware she was nobility in a kingdom none of them had ever heard of.

Even if she could have her wish, she didn't know which option she would choose. The mere choice scared her. She had lived with Stephan for so long she had forgotten what it was like to choose for herself.

"You seem to know a lot about their daughter," Esmera told Tauram, partially out of curiosity, partially to shift the discomforting focus of their conversation.

"Yes, well, I was closely acquainted with the family." Was Tauram blushing? Before Esmera could tell, he turned back to the fire, leaving her to flail in her overwhelming uncertainty.

"What I don't understand is who would've killed them and why."

Had things been different—had whichever psychopath not set their forces on House Finnaz—Esmera might've had a family. She'd have been the daughter of a lord—a lady—without having to collect the shards of her past and build them into the life she should've had.

"They were just a young couple with little children." Esmera shouldn't be choking up. She didn't even know these people, but maybe she didn't need to. They were part of her.

"They were more than that, Esmera." In the gentleness of Tauram's smile, there was also admiration. "They were the last remaining members of a powerful family. Their sons would've grown into lords and generals. Their daughter..." Tauram's eyes latched onto Esmera's. Something she couldn't name burned in them as he said, so softly she may not have heard him if her hearing wasn't so acute, "Well, she would've been a Queen."

A Queen? Now Esmera was certain it couldn't be her they were talking about.

Tauram's words electrified the air between them, and Esmera had no idea why. She dismissed it as yet another figment of her imagination when he continued speaking as if it hadn't happened.

"Legend has it that House Finnaz possessed a dangerous weapon that could only be wielded by their bloodline. Their deaths were one of the greatest mysteries of this time, but my best guess is that whoever was behind it wanted them out of the way for some bigger plan." Tauram spoke of his theory with the conviction of someone who had thought about it for years.

Esmera decided to test out her hypothesis. "What sort of bigger plan?"

Tauram clasped his hands as if containing a secret between his palms. "I wouldn't know."

Esmera raised her eyebrows, curious. "Why not?"

Tauram took a breath, then another, followed by another. Just when Esmera was afraid that he wouldn't answer or, even worse, dismiss her from his company, he said, "I'm no longer welcome in Milatanur."

Whatever answer she had been expecting, it wasn't that. There was a subtle warning in Tauram's voice, but Esmera paid it no heed. She was here with him, and he was her only link to the world that belonged to them both.

She couldn't have kept her question back even if she wanted to. "Why is that?"

Because Esmera knew what Tauram's smile looked like, how his narrow eyes crinkled until they were a mere glimmer, how his lips parted, she knew this smile was forced. Even worse, there was a direct warning within it and his next words. "I think we've gone off-topic."

On the contrary, Esmera thought. This was all crucial information to contextualise everything that had led to her standing beside the fire in Tauram's study while he sat across from her.

As determined as she was to find out all she could about Milatanur, she also knew when to back off.

If Tauram didn't want to talk about whatever had gotten him kicked out of Milatanur, Esmera wouldn't push him. She still had many questions in need of answers, and annoying him on his one touchy point wasn't a smart way to go about that.

Esmera veered back into what she hoped was safe territory. "How does the lark connect to any of this?"

There it was again, that smile that left Esmera feeling uncertain whether she was in on Tauram's joke or the joke itself.

"The little bird keeps bringing you gifts to convince you to accept his proposal."

A wave of sickening anxiety passed through Esmera. A proposal could only mean one thing.

"He's asking me to marry him?" The words sounded completely ludicrous being spoken aloud, but in Esmera's mind, they made sense. A bird wanting to marry her wouldn't be the strangest thing that had happened that day. For all she knew, he was a man in disguise, maybe even the king who would've made her a Queen had she grown up a Finnaz in Milatanur.

Tauram's mouth turned as soft as the chuckle that escaped it. "No, he's asking if you'll accept and claim him as your familiar."