Chapter 26: The Sunlight

Chapter 26: Chapter 26: The Sunlight

Monday morning, Seraphina woke before the guards came for her and lay staring at the ceiling for a few seconds before she remembered.

Today. She was going outside. For the first time in seven years, she was going to see the sun.

She sat up slowly. The thought should have meant nothing to her. Years ago she might have wondered what the city looked like now, might have been curious how much had changed, but she’d stopped caring about the outside world a long time before that.

The prison had simply become another place to exist, and honestly, her life before it hadn’t been much brighter: a dull childhood, an unremarkable adolescence, and then the incident, and then nothing but silence after that.

Prison had never really felt like a drastic change. Just another location. Another place to disappear.

So why was her heart beating faster now? Why did the thought of seeing open sky make her feel —

she searched for the word —

*excited*?

She stood and crossed to the small mirror in her cell, and the face looking back at her was different somehow.

There was something in her own eyes that hadn’t been there months ago: anticipation, curiosity, something close to hope. She barely recognized it.

Why did everything suddenly seem worth looking at? Why did things that used to mean nothing matter now?

She already knew the answer. There was only one person responsible.

*Felix.*

She looked down at her own hands, and a small smile crossed her face, innocent at first, then slowly widening into something a little too wide. Something not quite natural.

*What have you done to me, Felix?*

She’d found something she’d never had before, something she could lose. And that changed everything.

Her eyes narrowed slightly.

*I need strength.*

Not for freedom. Not for redemption, not even for herself. She wanted strength because there was finally something in this world she couldn’t stand the thought of losing.

*If someone tries to take you away from me...*

Her smile widened further.

*I’ll burn everything.*

A knock at the door snapped her back, and her expression smoothed itself out instantly. The door opened on a guard. "Time to go."

She nodded. Today was the start of something new.

---

The elevator carried her up, higher and higher, further than she’d traveled in years. When it finally stopped and the doors opened, she followed the guard forward and then sunlight touched her face, and she stopped moving entirely.

For several seconds she just stood there, letting the warmth spread across her skin, eyes closing on their own.

She tilted her face up toward it, and to anyone who didn’t know her story, she would have looked like nothing more than a beautiful young woman standing under the morning sun, silver hair catching the light.

She opened her eyes, and the world looked different or maybe she was the one who’d changed. Buildings stretched up into the sky. Traffic moved through the streets. People passed each other without a second glance, voices and noise and motion everywhere she looked. So much life.

*So this is what I missed,* she thought, and the thought itself surprised her, she’d spent years believing she had nothing left to miss at all. She’d been wrong.

The guard kept walking, and she followed, eyes still wandering everywhere: the city, the sky, the people, the light. And then she saw him.

Felix, standing with his team near the mission plaza.

For a moment everything else dropped away: the crowd blurred, the noise faded, her whole attention narrowing down to exactly one person in the entire city. Her pace picked up on its own.

Felix was mid-conversation with Kael when he spotted her coming, and his face lit up. He raised a hand. "Morning, Seraphina."

She didn’t stop walking. She closed the last few meters and, before he could react, wrapped both arms around him.

The plaza went completely still. Felix’s raised hand hung frozen in the air. Seraphina rested her head against his chest.

"Thank you," she said, barely above a whisper.

Silence swallowed the whole square. Kael’s mouth fell open. Lena’s eyes went wide. Mira looked like she’d forgotten how breathing worked.

Ryan turned slowly toward Orion, who happened to be mid-sip on something, looked from Seraphina to Felix and back, and promptly spat his drink directly into Kael’s face.

Kael stood there, dripping. "...Orion."

"I—"

"What the *hell* was that?!"

Nobody answered, because nobody was looking at Kael anymore. Every eye in the plaza had locked onto Felix and the woman currently wrapped around him.

And Felix, for maybe the first time in his life, had absolutely no idea what to do.