Nia

The world tilted when I woke. The first thing I felt wasn’t pain, wasn’t even the heavy weight on my chest—it was silence. A silence so sharp it cut deeper than the bullet that had torn through me.

I blinked, vision swimming, and caught the fluorescent lights above me. White, sterile, buzzing. Not the darkness of Matteo’s hell. Not the ground where my body had fallen.

The steady beep beside me made it real. I wasn’t dead. Not yet.

My throat burned as I tried to speak. ...