***
{Outside The Projection}
The reaction in the hall was... muted.
It wasn't silent, no, sobs were heard about, murmurs and whispers, but besides that?
Nothing really.
No loud exclamations, no sharp intakes of breath, no heated conversations like before.
Many faces turned away, as if they didn't want to be seen breaking. Others just stood there, frozen, their eyes fixed on the projection as if they could burn a different ending into it.
Layla... she wasn't just crying. She was weeping.
Not the loud, ugly kind. No wails, no desperate, broken sounds.
Just the kind of tears that came from so deep in the soul that they barely made a sound at all.
Her shoulders trembled, her chest rose and fell in shuddering breaths, but her eyes—
Her eyes were locked on the past her.
On that drunken, hollowed-out woman who didn't even recognize what she had right in front of her. Who had let a ghost slip through her fingers, too blind, too broken to see it for what it was.
