I didn’t want to believe it at first. I couldn’t. My heart thudded painfully in my chest as I stared into the darkened treeline. The figure emerging from the shadows was too familiar. Too wrong. My breath caught, and for a moment, I couldn’t move.
Ronan.
The name hit me like a wave, a rush of memories and old wounds slamming into me. He wasn’t supposed to be here. He couldn’t be. The very idea of him—alive, standing before me—felt like a betrayal to everything I had fought for. Everything I had become.
The rogues around me froze too, their eyes shifting from me to the figure in the distance. I could feel the shift in the air, the subtle tension that spread through the camp like wildfire. They didn’t know him. They didn’t know what he was to me.
And they didn’t know what it meant for us
