Thoren
For a few seconds after she disappeared through the window, I didn’t move.
It wasn’t hesitation. It wasn’t doubt. It was something quieter and far more dangerous—the kind of stillness that comes when your body hasn’t caught up to what your mind already understands. Nevara was gone. Noah was with her. The plan had shifted from something contained within these walls to something moving through open ground, exposed and vulnerable and dependent on timing that we no longer controlled.
That was the part that pressed hardest.
Not the escape itself, but everything that came after it.
I forced myself to step back from the window, dragging my attention away from the dark stretch of land beyond it and back into the room. The space felt smaller now, more confined than it had before, not be
