They reached the shelter an hour past dawn, and Amara had never been so grateful to see four solid walls in her life.
It wasn’t much to look at from the outside, just a low stone building half sunk into a hillside, ivy dragging over cracked mortar. Inside, though, it was clearly built for exactly this, thick walls, narrow windows, a single defensible entrance that Rhea’s people fell into position around without needing to be told.
Damian gave Amara barely an hour to rest before he was pulling her back outside.
“You’re relentless,” she muttered, dragging herself upright.
“You’re late.” He tossed her the same worn branch from two nights before. “Again.”
The training blurred into rhythm, strike and block and correction, and somewhere in the exhaustion of it Amara noticed her body respond
