"HOW MANY?" Mailah asked quietly.
Grayson flinched at the bluntness of her question, a flicker of raw pain crossing his features before it was quickly masked.
He had expected revulsion, fear, but not this calm demand for the awful, unvarnished truth.
He turned back towards her, his expression a carefully constructed mask of neutrality, though his eyes gave him away.
They were ancient, wounded.
"Too many to count," he said, his voice dropping to a low, gravelly timbre that vibrated with a lifetime of buried guilt.
He didn't look at her, instead focusing on a distant, invisible point in the park. "It wasn't... a thing you tracked. Not like numbers on a ledger."
He ran a hand over his face, as if trying to wipe away the memories.
His gaze darted away, to the calm surface of the river. "It's not a story for a quiet evening walk, Mailah. It's not a fairy tale."
