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I pulled away from Pasha and grinned. “What’s The Crystal Chamber?”

“One of the many new rooms at the club we’re building. A viewing room, if you will.” He paused, staring into my eyes. “We have plenty others we can explore,” he teased.

“Is that so?”

“So help me, God,” Sebastian exclaimed.

Pasha grinned. “You have nothing to worry about. I won’t ever share the view, brother.”

Brother. The word had my heart soaring. It was more than a title thrown around. It was a promise. One that meant that we were a family again. I looked around the room. At my parents. The Kings, Kinsley, Tori, Declan, Sebastian, and Pasha.

Our family wasn’t the same. It never would be again. Some pieces were gone forever. Others were broken and needed to be painstakingly put back together. But perhaps that was the point.

Love was never meant to be safe. It was never meant to leave you unscathed. It was the core thing needed to find one another again when you lost your way.

I had been lost many times over. In him is where I’d been found.

Together we had been broken. And now, at long last, we’d come full circle, our hearts forever bound.

Two Months Later

“What do you think?”

Nikolai studied the tablet. His thumb swiped across the screen and then back again. I wanted to laugh at the lines crinkling his forehead and tell him he looked like Alek, but I didn’t want to break his concentration.

There were several options for him to choose from. This had to work. The burning need to find Winter was all I could think about lately. Maybe it was because summer was ending, and before I knew it, we’d breeze through autumn and find ourselves facing another winter without her.

I didn’t want to spend another season staring at that empty seat in the dining room, while Kinsley decorated the house and hung a stocking for her. My chest tightened. Pasha slipped an arm around my waist and nestled his chin on my shoulder. The warmth of his support seeped into my body, calming me.

“What do you think, Crow?” he asked.

“I think Izzy did a lot of work on these.”

“That’s not what he was asking,” I huffed, finally fed up with the silence.

One corner of Nik’s mouth lifted. His attention returned to the screen. It had taken me weeks to finish them. I’d started with the drawings we’d collected of her from the castle. Then I pulled every memory I could from the darkest corners of my mind.

The shape of her eyes. The slope of her nose. The freckles scattered across her cheeks. The fiery red hue of her hair and how it fell around her face as she sat with her cello. From there, I’d done what I did best and drawn dozens of versions of her.

I’d aged her a little differently in each one, changing the fullness of her face, the length of her hair. After scanning the drawings, I’d cleaned them up digitally and narrowed them down to the ones I thought looked the most believable.

Nik swiped and enlarged the next image with two fingers.

“If I ignore the things you’re guessing at and isolate what probably hasn’t changed much—the spacing of her eyes, the proportions of her face, the bridge of her nose—I might be able to build something searchable from this.” His gaze lifted. “Can I see the drawings of her as a child again?”

A warmth sparked deep behind my heart. I swallowed hard, trying to force down the desperate, fragile thing rising in my throat.

Hope. He hadn’t said no.

I reached for the tablet, opened the folder and brought up the images, before placing it back into his hands.

He studied them for several minutes, moving between them before enlarging one. “These are better.”

“Gee, thanks.” I rolled my eyes.

“For what I need them for, smartass. You’re guessing at what she looks like in the adult versions. Here, you’re drawing someone you actually knew.”

His eyes lifted to mine briefly before returning to the screen. “This is where we start.”