Aqua didn’t know how she’d gotten lost.
Her head throbbed. Her vision wavered at the edges, like she was underwater. One moment she was in the recovery room beside Aries, watching the steady rise and fall of his chest… and the next, she was standing alone in a forest that felt too real to be a dream and too impossible to be anything else.
“How did I get here? Where am I?”
The forest looked almost familiar — like a place she’d seen in a photograph or half‑remembered childhood memory — but the details were wrong. The trees were too tall. The air smelled too sharp. The silence was too absolute.
Then the cold hit her.
Not normal cold.
Not winter cold.
A biting, unnatural chill that sank into her skin like tiny teeth.
“Okay,” she muttered, hugging herself. “This is fine. I’m a city girl
