Chapter 4
A Debt Unpaid
Jey grapples with the truth of his past actions, the weight of his guilt intensifying as he grows closer to Kyara. He must protect her from Ashe while confronting the mistakes that haunt him.
The rain had stopped, leaving the city slick and gleaming under the bruised twilight sky. Jey stood by the window, the chill of the glass seeping into his fingertips. Each droplet that traced a path down the pane felt like another tick of a cosmic clock, counting down to something inevitable. His gaze was fixed on the distant, indifferent lights of the metropolis, but his mind was a thousand miles away, trapped in the echoing chambers of his past.
He traced the jagged scar that marred the skin of his left palm, a constant, throbbing reminder of the night that had irrevocably altered the course of his life, and hers. The memory was a phantom limb, an ache he couldn’t quite shake. He saw her again, small and terrified, her eyes wide with a pain that had nothing to do with physical injury. He saw the chaos, the smoke, the screams that had ripped through the opulent halls of her family’s estate. And he saw himself, a boy barely out of his teens, making a choice born of fear and misplaced loyalty, a choice that had chained him to this crushing guilt ever since.
Kyara. Her name was a silent prayer on his lips, a constant whisper in the back of his mind. She