Rissa’s POV

The morning came quietly and thin, the kind of light that didn’t warm anything. It just revealed the damage.

Ash clung to the ground like frost. The trees leaned in silence, blackened at their roots, their branches heavy with the ghosts of the night before.

Josh was still asleep when I went back inside. His fever had eased, but he looked smaller somehow, less like the man I remembered and more like the wreckage of one. His shirt was stuck to his shoulder with dried blood, the ...