Alina’s POV

The air outside smelled like wet earth and forgotten promises.

The rain had stopped, but the world still looked washed out — as if even the sky was too tired to cry anymore.

I pulled Ares’s jacket tighter around my shoulders. The fabric was heavy, smelling faintly of smoke and cedar. A strange comfort for a girl who had sworn never to find safety in him again.

But things had changed.

Too much.

The fire. The secrets. The revelation that his father — their father — had ...