Aeliana exhaled.
Slow. Soft.
Her body was fading.
She could feel it—the end.
The storm inside her had raged, fought, burned with everything it had, but it wasn't enough. The black mass within her veins still pulsed, still consumed, still won.
It was over.
And she—
She accepted it.
Her lips barely moved as she forced out one last whisper, her voice fragile, weak—on the verge of vanishing entirely.
"If we meet in another life…"
A slow blink.
A small, tired breath.
"I will make sure to pay you back… for everything."
She let herself sink into the feeling.
The weightlessness.
The surrender.
And in those final moments, as the last threads of her awareness unraveled, she thought of him.
Lucavion.
The arrogant, manipulative, infuriating bastard.
How he had somehow intruded into her life, forced his way past her walls, shoved himself into her carefully built barriers without permission.
How he had looked right through her ugly, bitter, broken self—
And did not turn away.
