The family has a ritual for girls who are no longer new, and they do not call it the Offering until it has already begun.
Alistair has counted down to the end of the season since before she understood there was anything to count.
She is supposed to take comfort in the three men who would burn the house down for her, but comfort means little when she cannot tell which of them to ask.
Once the ritual starts, that choice may no longer belong to her at all.
What she once mistook for survival—learning the rules of a forbidden family and the cult concealed inside it—now looks more like the moment she becomes worth losing.
She does not yet see that the season has already claimed her.
