Serena’s POV
The dining hall was already too loud before I even sat down, voices spilling over one another, laughter stretched a little too thin, forks hitting porcelain with a rhythm that sounded more like impatience than celebration, and yet somehow under all that noise there was the kind of silence that presses on your ears when someone across the room refuses to stop watching you.
Kael.
He hadn’t looked away since I walked in, his stare heavy, unblinking, and though I didn’t once lift my gaze to meet his, I felt every second of it like heat against my skin, like he was daring me to acknowledge him, to break the wall I had built brick by brick ever since the night Ari almost died and the promise he swore to me snapped in my hands like glass.
I sat at the far end, where the table str
