I didn’t think it would hurt like this.
Or weigh so much.
Not the blood. Not Silas’s unmoving face after the order. Not the fallen bodies of those who had once been shadows in my childhood.
But what comes after.
The silence.
The part where you’re supposed to feel relief… and don’t.
Lilith. Silas. Two names burned into me like a scorched tattoo. Two killers. Two pieces of a macabre puzzle that stole from me what I never even got to know: a life with my parents.
And now… they’re dead.
I gave the order. I decided.
It wasn’t impulse.
It was judgment.
It was the weight of everything I’d seen, everything I’d felt in the vision Nox gave me. The smoke. The groaning metal. My mother’s body. My father’s howl before the fire silenced him.
I did it for them.
And yet here I am… still awake
