جميع فصول : الفصل -الفصل 4

~Lyra's POV~The first thing I notice is the smell.Pancakes. Warm butter. A faint hint of cinnamon drifting through the air like the house itself is trying to comfort me.I lie still for a long moment, staring up at the ceiling. The ceiling is white with a thin crack running diagonally from the light fixture toward the window, a crack I memorized all my life, counting it like a familiar scar.This ceiling.This room.I sit up slowly and my body feels… fine. No bruises. No deep bone-cold ache. No dried blood on my palms. I look at my hands, turning them over once, twice, three times. The skin is smooth, unbroken. Younger than I remember it being.The door swings open and Zara walks in.She is grinning, bright and easy, her locs pulled up in a messy bun with a pen stuck through them, wearing one of her ridiculous oversized hoodies that reads WORLD'S OKAYEST PERSON across the chest in cracked iron-on letters.Alive. Completely, fully, annoyingly alive."Finally!" She throws her arms out

~Lyra's POV~I was in the forest before the sun came up.The trail was familiar in the way only childhood things are, not something you think about, just something your feet remember. The roots, the low branch at the third turn, the place where the path narrows and the trees crowd in close enough to brush both shoulders. I had walked this so many times as a girl that my body found it in the dark without trying.I hadn't done it in years. Ivan's pack had cured me of it efficiently. Wolfless omegas don't belong in the trees at sunrise. That was the unspoken rule. You learn it fast enough when nobody says it directly but everyone acts accordingly.I had forgotten, somewhere in those seven years, that this used to be mine.I started walking. Then I ran.Not the way I used to run in my previous life, not desperate, not driven by anything chasing me. Just running because I had legs and lungs and a body that was young again and didn't hurt and above all, I wanted to get my mind off what happ