POV: Aria
The night air felt heavy against my skin, thick with the electricity of something coming undone. The wind rustled through the trees like whispers in a language I didn’t understand, and the river below me shimmered in silver threads under the moon. But even nature’s hush couldn’t silence what stirred inside me.
She was waking up.
I could feel her now, not just like a shadow in the corner of my thoughts—but as a presence. A second heartbeat. A foreign rhythm growing louder each time I tried to push her back down. I’d fought her whispers for days, maybe weeks. But something about tonight—the full moon, Kael’s truth unraveling before my eyes, the return of his not-so-dead mother—had cracked open the part of me that kept her caged.
“I know you’re there,” I said aloud to the trees,
