The silence was an answer.
It was a vast, echoing void where a single word—you—should have been. Auren stood before her, his face a mask of shattered, agonizing conflict, and he said nothing. He could not choose her. Or he would not. In the end, the distinction didn't matter.
His silence was a choice. It was the final, devastating blow that broke the last of her hope.
Her. Or me.
And he had chosen silence.
A cold, hard clarity washed over Elyra, freezing the tears in her eyes, turning her grief into something sharp and brittle as ice. She had wept. She had pleaded. She had fought. And now, she was done.
She turned from him, her movements no longer the frantic gestures of a heartbroken wife, but the calm, deliberate actions of a queen who had just been handed a declaration of war.
"I see," she said, her voice a dead, hollow thing. She walked past him, out of the chapel, out of the ashes of their marriage, and did not look back.
