KAEL
The silence in the suite after the door closed behind Ash and Sylas was not an absence of sound, but a presence. It was a heavy, living thing that pressed in on my eardrums, thick with the ghosts of their warnings and the terrifying reality of what was to come.
I stood at the window, my knuckles white where they gripped the sill, staring down at the city without seeing it. My mind was a relentless reel, playing and replaying the sound of Aria's voice as she spoke... that fragile, trembling thread of steel as she'd agreed to meet the woman who had tried to annihilate us.
Two hours. One hundred and twenty minutes until she walked into a room and sat across from a predator.
The soft click of the bathroom door opening behind me was a gunshot in the quiet. I heard her footsteps, the whisper of fabric as she gathered her things to shower.
