A scar is the thing that didn’t — the body’s quiet record that you were harmed and you lived anyway, that whatever tried to end you failed.

Seraphina thought she was exposing a weakness.

She was displaying, to four hundred of the most powerful people in the city, the single most honorable thing about me, and I stood there with the silk fallen away and let them look, because I had made my peace with that mark in a hospital bed six years earlier and nothing she could say was going to unmake it.

Chapter 2 — Damaged Things

Seraphina lifted her microphone.

“Kelvin always did have a weakness for damaged things.”