Alister didn't speak.
Couldn't.
The silence between them now felt like the space between lightning and thunder—charged, inevitable.
He looked at Miyu, really looked at her, and not just as the little sister he used to visit. Not as the fragile girl whose blood had once nearly drowned her from the inside out, lying beneath layers of silk and wires in a sterile bed.
Not even as the girl who had clung to life like a flickering candle.
She wasn't that girl anymore.
She was a dragon.
A truth he hadn't fully accepted until now—because doing so meant admitting something far harder: she could bleed again. She could die again. And this time… it might not be fate's mistake. It might be his.
"…You really mean that, didn't you," he murmured, the question not for her but for himself. His voice was quieter now, like the wind after a storm.
Miyu didn't answer. Her silence was the answer.
