Ava's POV
She lasted forty minutes.
Forty minutes of sitting on the bed with the panic button in her hand and the city outside doing its indifferent thing and the room being so quiet she could hear the hum of the heating and her own breathing and not much else.
She tried to think about practical things. Sophie is coming home tonight, Leo had said. That was not conditional. She turned that over and examined it from different angles and found it solid and set it down.
She tried to think about what came after. Not the big after that was too large and too complicated and too full of questions she didn't have answers for. Just the immediate after. Sophie safe. Mark handled it somehow. Vitelli's people are no longer treating the city like a hunting ground. A moment where she could sit somewhere ordinary and not be moving and not be afraid.
