Sleep offered no escape. Cole spent the remaining hours of the night in a state of agitated vigilance, his mind replaying Elara's words on a loop.
"You don't get to choose."The thought was a cage, and his mercenary instincts, honed by years of prizing freedom and detachment above all else, rattled against its bars. He was a contractor, not a patron saint. His services were rendered for coin or for his own survival, not for the abstract currency of hope.
As the first grey fingers of dawn stretched across the sky, casting the city in a palette of slate and rose, Cole was already moving. He needed to see. He needed to witness the consequences of his decision to leave Launda Evazabeth as a gift-wrapped problem for the town. He told himself it was a tactical assessment—gauging an enemy's response by observing how they handle a captured asset. But it was a thin lie. He was drawn to the epicenter of the trouble he had started, a moth to a flame he himself had lit.
