CHAPTER ONE
The bracelet scanned green as she passed the security checkpoint, flashing once like a blinking eye that recognized her, but didn't welcome her. A quiet hiss followed as the glass doors parted, smooth and soundless, like the breath before judgment.
Liora stepped inside with her face a perfect mask, blank as frost, though beneath it, a storm rattled the windows of her mind. The air felt different here. Thicker. As if the building itself remembered things it wasn't supposed to say out loud. Almost immediately, she felt it, pairs of eyes latching onto her like the weight of unspoken history.
They didn't stare openly. No one ever did. But glances lingered, just long enough to whisper:
We remember.
Who she was.
Who she used to be.
Her gaze stayed forward, cold and unshaken. She adjusted the bracelet on her wrist, the new one, the thin black band they gave them all at entry. It didn't feel like hers. Too light, too clean. It clung to her like a borrowed name. Her old one had weight. Her old one had meant something. It had felt like power. Like belonging.
And then him.
Lucien.
He was seated at the far end of the atrium, as composed as a painting hung just slightly off-center. One leg crossed, sleeves rolled up neatly to his elbows. A datapad rested in his hand, its screen glowing faintly, casting sharp light across the sharp lines of his face. He didn't look up.
Of course he was here.
And of course he wasn't surprised.
She kept walking. Though some stubborn ache in her ribs begged her to stop—to breathe. To brace herself. She should've stopped. But her legs moved like they remembered something older than safety.
"You're early," she said, letting the words fall into the silence between them like pebbles into a lake.
Lucien didn't lift his head. "You're late."
"I wasn't aware we scheduled anything."
"You didn't need to."
And then he looked up.
His eyes were glacial—calm, calculating. They hadn't changed. They pierced straight through the shields she'd rebuilt like glass windows. Fragile. See-through. Useless.
She folded her arms. Her voice sharpened. "Still dramatic, I see."
Lucien stood slowly, folding the datapad and sliding it into his coat like an afterthought. "Still running, I see."
The words landed like a hand pressed to a bruise. She didn't flinch. But she felt it. Felt it in her spine, where old things still ached. Felt it in her breath, caught just behind her teeth. Felt it in the part of her that she thought she'd left buried beneath Ironhall's ancient stone walls.
"You think this was running?"
He stepped forward, closing a distance far older than the space between them. "Wasn't it?"
She looked past him, into the corridor where the new recruits murmured in slick, dark uniforms, pressed and proper, the scent of ambition clinging to them like cologne. They were here to climb. To conquer. To write history.
She was here to restart.
Or disappear.
"I left because I had to," she said quietly.
"And I stayed because I could," he replied.
She met his eyes. "Same choice."
Lucien gave a slight nod. "Different stories."
For a moment, silence rooted itself between them. Heavy. Not empty, but full of unspoken names, of memory, of laughter that now felt like it belonged to someone else. There was something sacred in that stillness, something that hurt worse than shouting.
They had stood side by side once.
Now even their silence was in uniform.
A voice echoed across the corridor. Sharp. Clipped.
"Step back in line, Liora."
Her name sounded wrong in someone else's mouth. Foreign. Flattened. But her body obeyed before her heart caught up. She stepped back.
Just like that, the illusion shattered.
They weren't two people with history.
Just ranks. Just numbers. Just faces in a system.
She held his gaze one last time, scanning for something, an apology, a fracture in the calm, a reason to stay.
But Lucien was a master of quiet exits.
His eyes were weatherless.
There was nothing.
No flicker of the boy who once pulled her out of the wreckage.
No trace of the partner who'd once trusted her to make the final call.
No echo of that long night on the tower roof, when they swore they'd never become this.
So she turned without a word, the way ghosts retreat. She walked back to the far end of the corridor, falling into line with the others. Their backs were straight, their eyes ahead. Just like hers.
Back to where they thought she belonged.
As if she hadn't once stood at the front.
As if she hadn't once called the shot.
And somewhere deep within her, beneath the layers of silence and steel, a quiet voice murmured:
You don't rebuild by looking back.
But even as she stared forward, her shadow stretched behind her, toward the man who didn't stop her. The man who still held the silence like a blade.