Morning didn’t arrive so much as intrude.Light crept in through the edges of the city, thin and unwelcome, exposing a world that had the audacity to keep functioning. Alex noticed it only because the color of the sky shifted on the screen reflected in front of him. He hadn’t moved since night bled into dawn. His body had settled into a kind of stillness that wasn’t calm—more like suspension, as if motion would fracture something he was barely holding together.Lily had been gone all night.Not missing in the bureaucratic sense. Not yet. There were no alerts, no official concern, no systems designed to acknowledge the particular kind of absence that hollowed him out from the inside. This was the kind of disappearance that lived between categories—too early to scream, too late to ignore.Sebastian stood near the window, watching the city wake up like it hadn’t just committed an unforgivable offense.“She could still surface,” he said quietly, not because he believed it, but because the
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