SERAPHINA’S POV
That night, I didn’t go home.
I followed Maya back to her place instead, my overnight bag slung over my shoulder.
Daniel was staying over at Kieran’s, and I told myself that I didn’t want to return to the silence of an empty house.
But that was only a half-truth.
I didn’t want to return to the silence of an empty house—because then I would have nothing to drown out my thoughts.
If I let those thoughts take over, the doubts would follow, and I wasn’t ready to face them, not after everything that happened earlier.
I already knew what my answer would be.
That certainty settled in my chest, a quiet weight both steady and unyielding.
But Lucian’s words from earlier still echoed faintly, not because they had changed my mind, but because they had brushed against something raw and unfamiliar inside me: fear.
Not the sharp, immediate kind that sent adrenaline spiking, but something subtler—psychic unease, like a pressure change before a storm.
