The days blurred like smoke in a sealed room.
Alina didn't know how long she had been in the cabin.
There was no clock. No calendar. Just the creak of the wooden beams in the wind and the sound of her own heartbeat, getting louder with every night she didn't sleep.
Cassian hadn't come back.
Not once.
Only the quiet hum of the generator outside reminded her someone was still watching.
Once every two days, the door creaked open just enough for supplies to be dropped inside — a box of food, a bottle of water, clothes in her size.
No note. No voice.
Not even footsteps.
She would sit and wait, hoping — hating herself for hoping — that it would be him.
But it never was.
Just the silence.
The kind of silence that doesn't just surround you.
It gets inside you.
---
She tried to leave once.
Tried to slip through the woods barefoot, dragging herself over thorns and wet stone.
But before she made it two miles out, she found the tracker on her ankle.
A thin silver band. Cold. Elegant.
Like him.
When she returned, exhausted, her lungs burning, she found something waiting on the cot.
Not punishment.
Not freedom.
Just a page from a book.
Underlined in red ink:
"The worst prison is the one you begged for."
She stared at it for hours.
---
Elsewhere, Cassian stood inside a black marble chamber deep below the Vale estate.
Screens lined the walls — men in suits, bank records, weapons shipments, coordinates. Every piece of the world his family once held in shadows.
And in the middle of it all: a blurred photo of Alina's mother.
Isabel Darrow.
She was the one who started this war, he'd once been told. The one who tried to bring down the old bloodlines. The one who died for it — and left a daughter behind.
Cassian had never cared about that woman.
Not until Alina became the same thing: a traitor with eyes too much like her mother's.
Luca entered, his tone cautious. "Word from London. Darrow's overseas allies are circling. They think you're weak now."
Cassian didn't flinch.
"Let them come," he said.
Luca frowned. "And the girl?"
Cassian's voice was dead flat. "She's already gone."
"But—"
"I buried her when she handed me over," he said. "Now I'm just feeding the ghost."
---
Alina stopped speaking to herself after the fifth day.
Stopped screaming after the seventh.
She sat now by the window, staring at the trees that never moved.
Once, she would have clawed her way out.
Now?
She couldn't even remember why she tried.
She read the note again.
Ashes don't speak.
She didn't want to be ash.
But every time she touched her skin, she swore she could feel herself disintegrating.
What had she become?
A daughter who betrayed the man she loved to save the one who used her?
Or a woman who loved a man who would rather cage her in silence than kill her?
Which was worse?
That Cassian hadn't ended her.
Or that he had looked at her and felt nothing at all?
---
One night, the door opened again.
Alina didn't look up at first.
She thought it was the usual: a box of food. More silence.
But she felt it.
The air shifted.
And then she heard his voice.
Low. Cold. Unfamiliar.
"Eat."
She looked up too fast.
He stood in the doorway — darker than she remembered, somehow taller in his stillness. His eyes were void. No warmth. No tension. Just absence.
Cassian Vale.
Or what was left of him.
"I'm not hungry," she whispered.
He walked in anyway, dropped the bag on the floor, and looked around the cabin like it disgusted him.
She tried to speak. "You haven't—"
"I didn't come to talk."
The words hit like a whip.
She stood slowly. "Then why did you come?"
Cassian looked at her. Really looked. And for a second — just a second — something flickered in his gaze. Not regret.
Recognition.
"You want an answer?" he said softly. "Here it is."
He stepped forward and pulled a folded photo from his pocket.
Dropped it on the table.
Alina's hands shook as she opened it.
It was her.
At sixteen.
Smiling. Holding a sketchpad. Her face clean. Pure. Before the blood, before the betrayal.
Cassian's voice was ice.
"I kept that photo in my pocket."
Her breath stopped.
"I used to look at it and tell myself you weren't like your father."
He took a step closer. "That you were just caught. Just scared."
Another step.
"That you kissed me because something in you still believed in us."
Alina's knees weakened.
"But now," he said darkly, "I look at that photo and see the lie."
He leaned in, voice against her skin.
"You were never the flame. Just the smoke."
Alina closed her eyes. "Cassian—"
"No," he whispered. "He's gone. And he's not coming back."
He turned to leave.
She grabbed his arm — desperate, foolish.
"Then kill me," she breathed. "If I'm dead to you, then finish it."
Cassian's mouth twisted into something that might've been a smile in another life.
But now?
It was cruelty.
"I'd rather let you rot in what's left of your conscience."
And then, he was gone.
Again.
---
That night, Alina tore the cabin apart.
She screamed. Cried. Ripped the sheets, broke the mirror.
She bled from her hands. From her knees.
And then she collapsed on the floor.
Curled like a child.
Breathing like someone drowning in their own choices.
And from the trees outside, a camera watched in silence.
Unblinking.
Waiting.