Kiel
I sat at my desk, fingers tapping restlessly against the pen I had been fiddling with for the last thirty minutes. The weight of the silence around me was suffocating, broken only by the occasional scrape of the chair as I shifted. I had already given strict instructions to the guards outside—nobody was allowed in, not even the Elders, not the warriors, not anyone except Varen. Right now, I didn't want anyone seeing me like this.
Josie's face lingered in my mind, her words like knives digging deeper into my chest with every replay. The disbelief in her eyes, the way her lips trembled when she accused me of lying—it had broken something in me. I kept telling myself I'd endured worse, but nothing compared to this emptiness that gnawed at me. I had faced wars, blood, betrayal… but her doubt, her rejection of me, felt like losing everything I had fought for in life.
