Lyra’s POV
There was a time I believed silence meant peace.
Not anymore.
Now silence meant Leo was watching. Somewhere. Somehow.
It had been less than 24 hours since I’d discovered Project Obsidian, and I still felt like I was crawling out of my own skin. The echo of his words from last night still haunted my ears: You’re the queen. And a queen doesn’t walk away from her king.
Jesus. What was that?
A proposal or a warning?
Maybe both. With Leo, every kiss came laced with arsenic and silk.
I hadn’t been able to sleep after that confrontation. I’d walked straight to my room, heart racing, hands shaking, and laid in bed staring at the ceiling like it owed me answers. None came. Just more questions. And the increasingly sharp realization that I was more trapped than ever.
Leo wasn’t j
