Emilio's POV
a place so far removed from everything I had known, it felt like the edge of the world. I was no longer the impulsive nineteen-year-old who had once fractured a friendship and fled the fallout, but a man of thirty, worn by years of drifting and quietly desperate for somewhere to land. I had purchased a plot of land and needed to see a man named Jonas, the one everyone said could make things happen in this isolated territory. But it wasn’t Jonas who held my attention that day. It was his daughter, Saintilia, just eight years old, who looked at me with a kind of unguarded curiosity that made me feel, for the first time in years, like I might belong.
She was a wisp of a thing, no more than eight years old, yet she moved with a profound, unsettling solemn purpose beside her fath
