Mathias flinched. The words didn't just reach his ears; they drove into his gut like a physical blade, twisting until the air vanished from his lungs.
"She wanted you to stand by..." he rasped. His eyes weren't just wide; they were haunted, flickering with a primal, claustrophobic terror. "She wanted you to watch them lower me into the dark... to stand there, silent and hollow, while they shoveled the cold dirt over my face?"
"Well... yes. So I told her it was impossible," Olivia whispered. Her voice carried a tremor, not of weakness, but of a ghost—the echo of an ancient defiance that had nearly cost her everything. "I looked into those cold, calculating eyes—eyes that saw you as nothing more than an inconvenient corpse—and I told her I would never do it. I couldn't. I refused to be the architect of your grave, Mathias."
The memory hit her then, a physical blow from the past that made her shoulders tense.
