Cade Halloway

Cade Halloway is Ava’s guardian, caretaker, and, as she eventually discovers, her biological father. The revelation changes the name Ava can give their relationship, but not the years of shared life that made him family before she knew they were related. Across the story, Cade’s care appears less as grand declarations than as shelter, food, domestic routines, and the steadfast presence Ava identifies with home.

Identity and Background

Ava and her mother, Lilia, spent much of Ava’s childhood on the run. Although returning to Currant put Cade in danger, Lilia sometimes brought Ava back there; to Ava, home meant wherever Cade was. The details she remembers are domestic and particular: during one snowbound holiday, Cade gave her new pajamas and showed her how to string popcorn and cranberries for a Christmas tree. He had no ornaments, so they decorated with popcorn chains and paper snowflakes. Duncan brought Ava a present of carved wooden animals, which sprang to life when he tapped them. The memory’s magic belongs to Duncan’s gift, but the warmth of the holiday belongs to the household Cade made possible.

Cade’s care also shaped Ava’s early sense of their relationship through small gestures and private language. When she arrived at his doorstep about five years before the present action, she was drenched, cold, and grieving Lilia’s death. Cade called her a half-drowned rat, then ushered her inside and wrapped her in a blanket. Before she lived with him, he had called her Mouse; after her arrival, the older nickname replaced it. To Ava, even the less conventionally tender Rat sounded affectionate because it came from Cade and carried the memory of being taken in.

Daily Care and the Meaning of Home

In the kitchen, Cade’s sleeves are rolled up as he scrubs dishes, while Duncan drinks coffee nearby. Ava objects that Cade is doing her chores, then takes up a dishcloth and the silverware. Her insistence is not simply an attempt to repay Cade’s kindness: after a night spent hunting an ice elemental, she wants the ordinary routines of teenage life back. Chores, in this scene, are a form of normality she can choose and participate in. Cade may think she is repaying him, but Duncan recognizes what the routine means to her.

The kitchen also shows how Cade cares for the people around him without making a display of it. When Ezra complains about the early hour, Cade silences him by setting down a plate of food. Ava describes Duncan as a rare visitor and recalls that Cade’s household has few friends, in part because caring for her has shaped the risks and limits of their lives. Against that isolation, Duncan’s regular visits with fish, jam, or eggs matter as signs of a small, sustained circle around the home Cade maintains.

Captivity and the Stakes of Family

During the confrontation with Venus, Owen, and Ryan James, Ava sees Cade bound and kneeling in front of a bonfire. Ryan stands unbound behind Venus. The sight fixes Ava’s priorities: she wants to draw Venus and Owen away from Cade, and she refuses to argue for Ryan’s safety while Cade is being treated like an animal. Cade’s captivity makes visible what his earlier domestic role might otherwise conceal: he is not merely the person who sheltered Ava, but someone she is willing to risk herself to save.

After the conflict, Angela recognizes that Ava acted to protect family, just as Angela would protect her son, Lock. She initially calls Cade Ava’s father. Ava corrects her: Cade is her guardian, family but not, as Ava understands it, a blood relative. Angela then asks what proof Ava has of her birthday, pointing out that she has no birth certificate and only Lilia’s word for the date. The exchange unsettles Ava’s certainty about the identity she has assigned to Cade, while the immediate evidence of their relationship remains unchanged: he is the person she fought to bring back.

The Revelation and Its Aftermath

Angela tells Cade he is Ava’s father before they leave her forest. A week later, Cade drives Ava to the Inferno after Alistair summons her. Their familiar relationship has suddenly acquired a different meaning, and neither has yet found a way to talk about it. Ava has long wanted to meet her father, but the man before her is already someone she knows intimately; the new fact makes their comfortable bond awkward rather than instantly transforming it. With the bookshop gone, Ava feels they have less to put between themselves and that awkwardness.

The uncertainty reaches beyond the label of father. Cade says Lilia never lied to him outright, though she hid things, and he cannot believe she kept the truth from him. Because Ava has no birth certificate, they do not know her birthday; she might even be eighteen and legally an adult. The disclosure therefore brings no clean account of the past, only a new kinship fact and unanswered questions about what Lilia concealed. Ava’s response is that people do strange things to protect the ones they love.

Cade answers that change can be difficult and painful while still allowing a relationship to be reevaluated for the better. He puts an arm around Ava, draws her close, and kisses the top of her head. She cannot imagine a life without him. Their bond is not resolved by the revelation so much as carried forward through the gestures that already defined it: closeness, care, and the willingness to make room for a changed understanding of one another.

Duncan and the Wider Family Bond

Cade’s importance is not limited to Ava’s perspective. Duncan says that he has no children of his own and that Cade is the closest thing he has to a son; he could not be prouder of him. Duncan explains that he opposed Venus’s leadership because she would eventually have killed Cade, whether to spur Ava or punish her. He did not want to lead the Coterie himself, but he could not accept Venus as its leader while Cade’s life was at stake.

Ava understands Duncan’s choice because she has just defended her own effort to save family. That parallel places Cade at the center of a wider network of chosen and biological bonds: he is the guardian who raised Ava, the son Duncan loves as family, and the father Ava discovers after years of living as his daughter in practice. The new truth revises the meaning of their shared history without making that history any less real.