Even Grandma Wanda, who had seen seventy winters and buried twice as many tragedies as anyone in the square, stood frozen with her wrinkled hand gripping her cane.
For a heartbeat she looked upon Cassius the same as all the rest, a monster painted in red, the butcher of their own kind.
But then her gaze wandered. Her eyes caught Nala standing just a few feet away, her granddaughter's expression caught in the pale blue haze of moonlight.
Nala wasn't trembling. She wasn't recoiling or covering her mouth like the others.
Her face was utterly still, her eyes glimmering with something far deeper, something Wanda had never expected to see.
It wasn't fear. It was something else that she couldn't figure out. And her chest rose and fell slowly, as though she were seeing not horror, but revelation.
And that realization hit Grandma Wanda like a strike to the chest.
He hadn't done it for pleasure, she realized. Not for cruelty's sake.
Cassius had done all of this, for them.
