The silence in the command center was more terrifying than the alarms. Silas’s words hung in the air like a death sentence. A war. He said it with the kind of cold, flat certainty that made the hair on my arms stand up. I looked back at the monitors, at the name Josiah Isaiah flashing in red on the interface, and then at the man who had been a ghost in my life for two years.
“You watched us, Silas,” I whispered, my voice thick with a betrayal that cut deeper than any knife. “You watched Toby take his first steps through a surveillance lens while I was skipping meals to keep the lights on?”
“I saw a woman becoming a lioness, Elena,” Silas said, stepping into my space until I could feel the heat radiating off his body. “If I had brought you back then, my mother or the Sterlings would have
