They shook.
But they did not falter.
She whispered something too soft to catch, but it wasn’t her words that pierced me.
It was theshape of her.
The curve of her spine beneath a soot-stained tunic.
The braid trailing down her back, frayed but familiar.
The tilt of her head—gentle, steady, impossibly known.
A stillness spread through my chest. My blood went cold.
No. It couldn’t be.
“Amara?”
The name tore from my throat like broken glass.
She froze.
Slowly—achingly slow—she turned.
Her face emerged in flickers of torchlight—pale, streaked with dirt and tears.
Pain detonated as I forced myself upright. Every tendon screamed, every burn split wider. My body convulsed under its own weight, but I moved anyway.
I stumbled forward—half crawling, half collapsing—until I collided with her.
I didn’t embrace her so much as fall into her. My arms shook. My breath caught on her shoulder.
For a heartbeat, she didn’t move.
Then—she did.
Her arms closed around me, pulling me in, and I clung to her like a dying man clung to the last breath he didn’t deserve.
“You’re alive,” I rasped, the words tumbling from my mouth before I could believe them. “Amara… you’re alive.”
“Oh, Lazarus—” Her voice wavered, as brittle as cracked clay.
She held me tighter than my ribs could bear, and I let her. Her skin smelled of smoke and old herbs, the scent of the healers’ tents from a life that felt like another century.
“I thought I lost you,” she whispered. “I thought they dragged you into the dark. I thought I’d never see you again.”
“They did,” I breathed. “They tried.”
She shuddered against me, her words coming uneven, fragile.
“When they took you and Salvatore, they came back for me. Said I was an accomplice. That I helped you kill your mother.”
The world stopped.
“You’re a prisoner,” I said quietly.
She nodded once, the motion slow and weary.
