The sky did not thunder.
It listened.
Anna felt it the way one feels a held breath just before a verdict—pressure without sound, judgment without words. The mountains around them seemed to lean inward, stone remembering older laws. Even the wind slowed, as if afraid to interrupt.
Lexus stood very still beside her.
Too still.
She knew that stillness. It was the stillness he wore before violence—before he decided something that could not be undone.
One of you must become singular.
The voice did not repeat itself. It didn’t need to. Heaven never argued; it corrected.
Anna swallowed. “No.”
The word felt small in her mouth, but it held.
Lexus did not echo her.
He turned—slowly—toward her, and in his eyes she saw it: the decision already made, already cutting.
“No,” she said again, s
