Chapter 68: An intimate apology
The silence thickened.
Darius didn't speak immediately, though his breath still came shallow. He stood with his back to her, like facing her might rip open a wound he didn't know how to close. Odi remained where she was, as if rooted by the weight of everything unsaid.
Then, slowly, he turned.
His eyes weren't cold anymore. Just tired. Torn. Human.
"I'm sorry," he said.
The words fell from his mouth like something sacred—fragile, weighted, nearly foreign in his own voice. They drifted into the space between them, disrupting the silence like a dropped relic in a temple.
Odi didn't blink.
Her eyes were steel. Her spine, straight. But her voice, when it came, was like a blade held at the throat of a memory. "For what?"
Darius swallowed. His chest rose once—twice—as if trying to gather enough breath for a truth that might gut him alive.
