"What would you do if everyone else just smiled and stayed silent because speaking up would inconvenience them?"
He wasn't angry. Not now.
He was asking.
Genuinely.
Painfully.
Would you still tell me I should've waited?
The silence that followed wasn't accusatory.
It was intimate.
It held weight.
And regret.
And the pieces of a world that wasn't fair enough to hold truth and comfort in the same hand.
Toven looked down at his boots. Caeden exhaled through his nose, something unreadable behind his eyes. Elayne's mouth was drawn tight—not in defiance, but in thought. And Mireilla…
She looked straight at him.
Her jaw locked.
But her silence said what words couldn't.
Because the truth hurt.
And sometimes it hurt more because it was right.
Lucavion let the moment hang.
ChatGPT said:
Toven was the one who broke the silence this time—quiet, uncharacteristically serious.
"…We get it, Luc."
Lucavion turned his gaze toward him slowly.
