Chapter 105: Why Do I Face Execution?

Roman I felt it the second her body stiffened in my arms. The shift was small, almost imperceptible to anyone else, but to me it was deafening. Her heartbeat thudded against my chest like a trapped bird desperate to break free. The rhythm was frantic, uneven, betraying everything her lips wouldn’t say out loud. Savannah was scared. Of me. Of what I'd just told her. And she had every right to be. I had disappeared without a word, then returned with blood under my nails and a dead body that I created. If I had told her the truth from the beginning—if I confessed that I would be gone because I was going to hunt down her abuser, staining my hands with his blood—she’d run. She would look at me with the same haunted terror I’d seen once before in her eyes, the night she told me everything about him. About what had been done to her. That’s why I didn’t tell her. She didn’t belong in this world. My father’s world. Mine. Ours. Her innocence, her softness, they were already fragile threads barel