ONE HELLISH YEAR.

CHAPTER TWO: SILVER EYES.

Chapter 2 — Silver Eyes

Sera had exactly one hour.

Kael had said it without checking his watch, without glancing at his phone, without any of the small human gestures people use to measure time.

He had simply stated it the way someone states a fact that was decided long before the conversation began.

One hour.

She drove to the hospital with both hands tight on the wheel and the radio off.

The streets were empty at this hour.

Just streetlights slowly fading and silence and the low hum of her engine cutting through the dark.

The whole road felt abandoned, like the city had quietly gone to sleep without her.

She thought about Mia.

The way her sister laughed whenever they were together —

too loud, always a beat longer than everyone else, like she found everything funnier than the rest of the world did.

The way she talked with her hands.

The memory of that night they had no money for a motel and ended up sleeping in the car, surviving on gas station crackers and each other's company.

Sera pressed harder on the accelerator.

She couldn't afford to slow down.

Not tonight.

The hospital parking lot was empty when she arrived.

No cars.

No movement.

Just the pale glow of the entrance lights spilling across the asphalt and the distant sound of a monitor beeping somewhere deep inside the building.

Kael had told her she had one hour before she leaves the human world forever.

No watch.

No phone.

Just certainty — the kind that didn't belong to anything human.

That thought kept pressing against the back of her mind.

“How does he just know things?”

She pushed it aside and walked through the doors.

Sera pushed and open the door to room 114 slowly, in case Mia was sleeping.

She wasn't.

She was sitting up against her pillows with her phone propped on her knees, her dark hair pulled into a messy knot, looking exactly like herself and nothing like someone who was running out of time.

That was the cruelest part.

She still looked like Mia.

She still looked like the girl who used to crawl into Sera's bed during _

thunderstorms and steal every single blanket without apology.

She looked up when the door opened.

"It's nearly one in the morning," Mia said.

"I know."

"What are you doing here?"

"I just wanted to see you." Sera pulled the chair close to the bed and sat down.

"How are you feeling?"

"I'm fine."

She gave a small smile.

"Better than yesterday."

Sera nodded and went quiet for a moment, just looking at her.

Taking her in.

The line of her jaw.

The small scar above her left eyebrow.

The way she tilted her head slightly when she was paying attention.

She had been memorizing these things without realizing it for weeks now.

Tonight she did it on purpose.

Mia watched her with narrowed eyes.

"You look weird," she said.

"Thank you."

"I'm serious Sera.

You look like you saw something."

She shifted closer.

"Tell me what's wrong."

"Nothing is wrong.

I'm just stressed." Sera kept her voice easy and light.

"I couldn't sleep so I came to see you. That's all."

Mia didn't look fully convinced but she let it go.

Sera changed the subject before she could circle back.

"Do you remember the night we slept in the car because we couldn't afford the motel?"

Mia's face broke open immediately.

"The one where we stopped at the filling station and you bought those crackers and tried to tell me they were good?"

"They were good."

"Sera, they were terrible."

"They were fine crackers."

"They were the worst crackers I have ever eaten in my life.

" Mia was already laughing — that laugh, too loud and a beat too long.

"And then you went sneaking around the outside of the motel looking for an unlocked room and they threw you out like —"

"Okay —"

"Like an actual piece of rubbish —"

"I remember, thank you —"

"How are you not more embarrassed about that story?"

"I am extremely embarrassed. I was hoping you had forgotten."

"I will never forget." Mia shook her head, still smiling.

"But it was a good night. You know? It was really a good night."

"Yeah," Sera said quietly. "It really was."

They sat together after that without saying much.

The monitor beside the bed kept its slow steady rhythm.

Somewhere down the corridor someone was being paged.

Outside the window the city was dark and completely ordinary and entirely unaware that anything had changed.

When Sera finally stood to leave she took her time doing it.

Straightened her jacket.

Picked up her bag.

Gave herself three extra seconds just standing there looking at her sister's face.

Then she leaned down and pulled Mia into a hug and held on.

Mia went still for just a moment — surprised by the tightness, the length of it — before her arms came up and held her back.

She smelled like the same shampoo she had used since she was sixteen and Sera closed her eyes and locked that away somewhere safe inside her chest.

She let go before either of them could say something that would undo her.

She was almost at the door.

"Sera."

She stopped. Didn't turn around.

"Are you okay?"

The question sat in the air between them.

Quiet and simple and entirely too close to everything she wasn't allowed to say.

"I will be," Sera said.

She walked out before her sister could hear the difference between that and a real answer.

He was waiting outside.

Of course he was.

Kael stood against the exterior wall of the hospital with his hands in his pockets and his eyes in the middle distance.

Motionless.

The hospital lights didn't quite reach him. The shadows fell differently near him.

Like even the dark made room for him.

Sera stopped when she saw him.

It hit her all at once then — the full weight of everything she had just done.

The goodbye that wasn't a goodbye.

The hug that had to be enough for a lifetime.

The look on Mia's face when she asked if she was okay.

Her throat tightened.

She pulled in one slow breath.

Then another.

Then she straightened her spine and walked toward him.

Kael watched her cross the distance.

He didn't move.

Didn't speak. Just watched — and something passed through his silver eyes as she got closer.

Something there and gone before she could name it.

"How is she?" he asked when she reached him.

"She's getting better." Sera kept her voice steady. "Stronger than yesterday."

"Did you tell her?"

"Tell her what?"

"The truth."

"No."

The word came out quietly but firmly.

"I couldn't.

If I had told her she wouldn't have let me go.

And I couldn't let her last memory of me be a fight."

Kael looked at her for a long moment.

Something moved through his expression — something brief and unreadable that he locked away before it could become anything she could hold onto.

He had seen pain before.

Centuries of it.

He had watched people make this exact sacrifice more times than she could count.

But this was different.

She was different.

He didn't let himself examine why.

"It's time," he said.

Sera's heart kicked hard against her ribs.

Her hands were steady.

Her voice was steady.

Everything on the outside was steady.

"I'm ready," she said.

He extended his hand.

She looked at it for just a moment — then she took it.

The world didn't shatter.

It dissolved.

Like a photograph left too long in light.

The hospital, the parking lot, the pale glow of the entrance — all of it bled slowly at the edges and faded.

Quietly.

Completely.

The sounds of the city softened first, then disappeared entirely.

The air changed — colder, cleaner, carrying something that had no name in any language she knew.

A cold rushing feeling moved through her.

Then silence.

A different kind of dark.

She closed her eyes.

When she opened them she was somewhere that was not the world she knew.

Something vast stretched out in front of her.

A structure of dark stone rising in sharp angles against a sky that wasn't quite black — it was deeper than black, layered, like looking into something that went further than sight could follow.

Light came from nowhere she could identify, a low silver glow that seemed almost to breathe.

Gardens grew things she had no names for.

Pathways burned with flames that didn't flicker.

A silence so complete she could hear her own heartbeat.

It was the most breathtaking and terrifying thing she had ever seen.

She turned to ask Kael where they were.

He wasn't looking at their surroundings.

He was looking at her.

And for one single unguarded moment — just one second before his expression locked itself back into something cold and unreadable — she saw it.

Something in his silver eyes that made no sense.

Something that looked almost like relief.

Not the relief of a completed transaction. Not the satisfaction of a sealed deal.

Something older than that. Something that had been carried for a very long time.

Like he had been waiting for her.

Not for one year.

For *centuries.*

His expression closed like a door quietly shut.

"This is where you will stay," he said.

He turned and walked ahead.

Sera followed.

But three steps in she stopped.

Because on the wall of the corridor — carved deep into the dark stone like it had always been there — was something that made her blood go cold.

Her face.

Not a painting. Not a sculpture.

Her face.

Her exact face.

Her eyes.

The line of her jaw.

Every detail — carved into the stone of a place that had existed long before she was born.

She spun around.

"Kael."

He had already stopped walking. He didn't turn around.

"How long have you known about me," she said.

Her voice was very quiet. The quietest kind of dangerous.

He was silent for a long moment.

And then —

"Longer than you want to know."

He walked on into the dark.

And Sera stood alone in the corridor staring at her own face in the stone —

wondering what she had really signed.