Alex sat on his apartment couch in the darkness, the silence pressing against him like a physical weight.
He'd walked home from Linda's house maybe twenty minutes ago... or was it thirty? Time felt strange after everything that had happened.
His mind kept replaying that last moment in Linda's bedroom. Her sleeping face, worn and exhausted from the manipulation she couldn't understand.
She was safe. The family was safe.
Everything he'd fought to protect was intact.
He'd done it. He'd passed the test. Refused corruption when every part of him had been pushed toward it.
The relief should have been overwhelming. And it was, in a way... like a physical weight lifting from his shoulders, leaving him hollow and light and strangely fragile.
But underneath that relief was exhaustion so profound it made his bones ache.
His body begged for sleep... a long, dreamless, mercy-of-the-universe kind of sleep.
But he couldn't. Not yet.
