Chapter 290 Valentina's Memory
POV: Callum | Parliament steps, then Rookeries
Five years.
The Parliament steps on the anniversary have a certain weight to them, the kind that places take on when they've witnessed something you carry with you. To everyone else, they're just stone steps under the midday sun. To me, they're something else entirely. The steps haven't changed, but I have.
I come every year. Not because I decide to each time, but because I made a promise to myself in the first year after, and some promises you keep because keeping them is the only way to honor what was lost. It's an acknowledgment that Valentina existed, that she was here, and that both those things matter enough to mark.
Dante comes with me. That started in the second year, when we both showed up on the same morning, discovering we'd independently arrived at the same ritual. We've been coming together ever since.
The flowers are always white—Dante's choice. I've never asked why, and he's never explained. That silence between us has become part of the ritual itself. Some things don't need words.
We sit for about an hour, the steps beneath us holding the memory of what happened here five years ago. The grief hasn't gotten smaller, but it's changed shape over the years, the way things do when you carry them long enough. The sharp edges have smoothed, but the weight remains.
Lucia is with me here—not literally, but in my chest, in the way that matters most. Valentina died for this child who's now five years old, sleeping in a sanctuary in the Rookeries, growing powers nobody has documented before. Powers Valentina would have been fascinated by.
After the hour, after the silence has done its work, Dante speaks. "She'd be proud. Of you, of Lucia, of what you've built."
I look at the steps, at the London morning around us, and think about pride. Valentina's pride wasn't given easily. It was specific, earned, the kind that came from someone who assessed things accurately and stated her assessments without compromise.
"She should be here," I say.
Dante is quiet for a moment, his expression the one he gets when he's receiving something he agrees with but wishes he didn't. I know that look well from five years of shared grief, a bond that exists between us in a way it doesn't with anyone else in our lives.
"I know," he says. "But she's not. So we honor her by living well."
Living well—that's what the past five years have been. An accumulation of days trying to be the right kind of days, sometimes succeeding, sometimes not. But adding up to something I believe Valentina would recognize as the right direction, even when the individual days were wrong.
We leave the steps, walking back through London as the city continues around us, indifferent to what we're carrying. Today, I'm carrying the locket—the small gold thing Isla found in the ashes and gave to me. I usually keep it in a drawer in the operational building, but today I forgot to put it back.
I realize this later that evening when Lucia is with me in the operational building. We've developed this after-dinner quiet time as our specific time together, separate from the sanctuary's routines or the pack's demands.
She finds the locket on my desk where I set it down. She picks it up and opens it with that curious way five-year-olds have with small, gold things that have mechanisms.
She looks at the photograph inside.
"Who's this?" she says.
I look at my daughter holding the locket with her mother's photograph inside, and I think about five years of planning this conversation, all the versions I've considered. And I understand that the right version is this one—the one that arrived rather than the one I planned.
"That's your mother," I say.