Faye pov I stopped running. Not because the danger had lessened, and not because I suddenly believed the situation had become manageable, but because something inside me finally reached a point where instinct no longer made sense. Every direction we moved in led to collapse, every defensive formation broke faster than it could be rebuilt, and every attempt to protect someone ended with more confusion than safety. So I stopped. And in that moment of stillness, I understood something I had been avoiding since this began. As long as I kept being treated as something fragile, something that needed to be shielded, everything around me would continue falling apart. I tightened my arms around the baby, feeling the faint but unstable rhythm of her presence against me. The echo inside her was still there, still alive, but it no longer felt like something I could simply release without consequence. It reacted too strongly now, too unpredictably, as if every use of it was changing t
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