Nessa's point of view)
I hadn't slept properly since the night I lied.
I told myself it would fade, the way most guilt does if you give it enough time and enough distraction. It hadn't. If anything it had gotten worse, sitting heavier in my chest with every day that passed since I watched them drag Elena out of that healer's room and lock her out of the only home she'd built with her own two hands for three years. I still saw her face sometimes when I closed my eyes. Not angry. That would have been easier to carry. Just quietly, devastatingly betrayed.
I hadn't wanted to lie. I needed that to be true, needed it the way I needed my next breath, because the alternative was admitting I'd simply been too afraid to do anything else.
Lyra had found me two nights before it happened, cornered
