The room felt smaller, tighter, as if the walls themselves were pressing in. My pulse surged, not just from fear but from the weight of unspoken truths hanging between us. Every shadow seemed alive, stretching toward us, testing, measuring. Adrian’s grip on my hand was iron-tight, grounding me, a silent promise in the chaos.
The figure before us, Lucas, though impossible in this place, his presence a living contradiction, stepped forward deliberately. His eyes, sharp and unreadable, flicked between Adrian and me. “You’ve been blind,” he said quietly, each word measured, deliberate, cutting through the tension. “Every move you made, every assumption, it was manipulated.”
My chest tightened, a taut wire threatening to snap. Betrayal mixed with disbelief, anger threading through each pulse.
