The silence that followed was not empty; it was heavy, a suffocating shroud that seemed to press against the very lungs of the two figures on the terrace. Mordecai waited, his heart hammering a frantic, uneven rhythm against his ribs, a drumbeat of dread.
He turned to look at Pavellia, desperate for a lie, a comfort, a shred of the diplomatic grace they had shared for months.
But Pavellia's expression held the specific, chilling quality of a mathematician who had already reached the end of a long, inevitable equation. She wasn't looking at him with pity; she was looking at him with the cold clarity of a mirror.
"The decision points existed earlier," she said, her voice cutting through the distant, dying echoes of the massacre below. "Three months ago, when I told you the alliance arrangement felt asymmetrical, it was one."
