Chapter432:

###Chapter 432 JANICE That is what I told myself, at least, in the moments before I began. There are rules to what I can do, and I want to set them down plainly, because I think it matters—maybe only to me—that the limits are real and not just a story I tell to make myself feel less like a monster. I cannot kill. Not directly, not as payment, not ever. Death is a door I am permitted to open once, for the person who is owed a second chance, and never again for them after that. Whatever else I do to Lumina, I cannot end her life. That is not mercy. It is simply outside what I am allowed to do. I cannot torture without end. Pain has its place in balance—suffering is sometimes the only currency a thread will accept—but it must have a shape and a limit, a beginning and a close. What I was doing to Lumina, sealing her in the grey, letting her drift in fragments too thin to hold onto, was not meant to be eternal. It was meant to last until the thread stabilized around her absence. Two years,