Ryan's POV
Night had come while I wasn't paying attention.
I woke up on the apartment sofa in absolute darkness. Dead quiet. The kind of silence that had a weight to it.
My mouth opened before I was fully conscious.
"Elara, why didn't you turn the lights on?"
The words traveled through the empty living room and came back to me alone.
I sat there for a moment, staring at nothing.
Then it hit me. All of it. The way it always hit me now — not gradually, but all at once, like stepping off a ledge.
Elara was gone.
She had burned. Her remains were in the cold ground.
The pain in my chest was the kind that bent you in half. I curled forward on the sofa, one hand pressed against my sternum, and Kai made the smallest sound I'd ever heard from him before going completely silent.
"Elara."
