Forty-Five: Awakening (Lena)

LENA

There was too much silence.

Not the silence of peace, but the kind that stretches into a vacuum—unnatural, uneasy. The kind that follows violence. A silence that listens, as if the walls themselves were holding their breath.

I floated in it, somewhere between waking and gone. I knew I should be dead. My body was broken. My blood had painted the stone. My will had frayed until it snapped like a wire pulled too tight.

But the bond held.

That fragile, flickering thread I thought I'd lost—it had returned. Faint, then pulsing. Then singing through my chest like light cracking through storm clouds.

Dom.

His name echoed in the hollow of my mind like a promise.