Ava DeLangelyen

Ava came to Saint-Spire as a novice — curly red hair tucked beneath a kerchief, hazel eyes holding more sorrow than a young woman should carry, a quiet the other sisters mistake for piety.

It is not piety. It is vigilance. Ava has spent years guarding a secret and a child with equal, unspoken ferocity — asking nothing, explaining less, wearing devotion like a vow taken in another life. She keeps an old pendant close to her heart and never quite says where it came from. She watches over the boy in her care as though the whole world depended on him, because — though she will not say it aloud — she believes it does.

She has worn a dozen names in a dozen towns and answered to all of them without flinching. Disguise is second nature now; so is the ache of never being able to tell the boy who she truly is, or who he truly is.

For protection. For silence.

The day the abbey begins to remember what it was built to hide, Ava will have to decide how long a guardian can keep the truth from the very person she swore to protect.