The hospital walls had become a second home, though they felt nothing like one. Cold. Sterile. Too silent for comfort. The kind of silence that screamed through your bones when you couldn’t stop blaming yourself.

*Aria* hadn’t left the infirmary since the night Lucien had collapsed.

Every morning, she knelt in the private corner the nurses had quietly left untouched—an alcove by the window, where the early rays of dawn filtered in like the soft glow of the Moon Goddess herself. That’s where she prayed. Over and over.

“Please bring him back to me,” she whispered each time, her voice hoarse from sleepless nights and countless sobs. “I’ll make it...