—Natasha's POV—
The four walls of my apartment had become a prison of my own anxieties. Each whispered rumor, each fragment of a threat—political crisis, blood test, Blood Claim—echoed in the silence, growing louder and more distorted until they were a deafening chorus in my mind. I was pacing, my skin prickling with a restless, trapped energy, when my phone vibrated on the coffee table with a sharp, insistent buzz that made me jump. The screen glowed with Enzo’s name.
"The silence is screaming from your end of the bond. You're spiraling. I can feel it. Let me get you out of here. Ten minutes. Outside."
He didn't ask. He stated a fact and offered a solution. A part of me, the part that was still desperately clinging to the ghost of my old life, screamed that this was a mistake, that an
