As the smoke gradually dissipated, Green—no, Brianna, was kneeling on the ground, hunched over Westley's corpse.
She looked down at him, her face submerged in the smoke, streaked with hazy, drifting white.
It was hard to say if she was like someone who had just woken from a long slumber, or someone who had been awake for a very long time, unable to sleep; in the smoke, her eyes burned—bright, hazy, bloodshot, and dry.
"...Dad?" she asked softly, her head lowered. "Are you okay?"
Fu Tailan didn't know if, compared to her, he was the more fortunate one, or the more unfortunate.
The laughter died in his chest like a spark. The smoke made his eyes water relentlessly. He wiped the tears away and, with near-perfect calm, remembered what he had to do.
This scene before him was, in the end, someone else's fate. No matter how long he stood here and watched, the break would have to end, and he'd have to return to his own prison sentence.
One father had died, but another had to be saved.
