Chapter 35 - your heart
35
~Lisa’s POV
Milo was still on his knees beside me, silent. Proud. But I could feel his eyes on me. I didn’t care how I looked anymore, pathetic, broken. Let them see it. Let them see what they did to me.
I looked up at them again, my body trembling under the weight of everything I’d endured, my knees aching against the cold, cracked stones of the courtyard floor.
"If you want to punish me, fine," I whispered, barely able to keep my voice steady. "Lash me. Lock me up. Send me to the coldest, darkest corner of this place and forget I ever existed. I’ll take it. All of it. But don’t kill him. Please..."
Kael’s face was unreadable, stone-like, rigid, unbothered. The weight of his silence pressed down on me harder than any guard’s grip. Then his voice came, clipped and cold. "He defied the rules."
He took a single step closer. "He crossed the line."
A bitter laugh escaped my throat before I could stop it, dry and broken and shaking at the edges. "And you didn’t?" I snapped, lifting my chin despite the tears running down my face. "You’ve crossed more lines than I can count."
I didn’t care how I sounded anymore. I didn’t care that my voice was rising, trembling with rage and hurt. My heart felt like it was being wrung out in front of them, and all they did was stand there.
𝑓𝑟𝑒𝘦𝓌𝑒𝑏𝑛𝑜𝘷𝑒𝘭.𝒸𝘰𝑚
"You broke me," I said, louder now. "Again and again. You ignored me, punished me for things I didn’t do. You treated me like a mistake, like a responsibility no one wanted to carry."
None of them interrupted me. None of them even looked surprised.
I swallowed hard. "And yet... I stayed. I stayed because I thought maybe, maybe, something would change. That one of you would finally look at me and see me. That one of you would say something, anything, that made me feel like I wasn’t just a ghost walking through your halls."