Nathan’s POV
I didn’t sleep. Not because I couldn’t, but because I refused to waste time pretending rest would give me clarity I didn’t already have. The moment I left that palace, the moment I saw her surrounded, attacked, contained inside a system that was already starting to fracture from within, everything shifted from possibility into inevitability. This wasn’t a question of if anymore.
It was when. And I had no intention of letting that “when” be decided by anyone but me. The map spread across the table in front of me wasn’t new. I had studied it before, memorized every entry point, every blind spot, every rotation pattern of guards that my spy had managed to confirm over the past weeks, but now I was looking at it differently. Not as someone planning an infiltration. As someone pr
