ADELE’S POV

I didn’t know how my feet carried me away from the training ground.

I just knew that if I stayed one more second—if I heard that word again, if I felt one more pair of eyes on me, if I watched Lucien stand there with that child clinging to him—I was going to break in a way I might never recover from.

So I walked.

My vision blurred, the world around me fading into colorless shapes. Gravel crunched beneath my boots, the sound too loud in the silence roaring inside my head. My chest felt tight, like invisible hands were squeezing my lungs, refusing to let me breathe...