The room didn’t change.Not immediately.Not in any obvious way.The same dim light stretched across the floor. The same quiet pressed gently against the walls. The same untouched food sat where it had been for hours, forgotten.But something—Subtle. Shifted.Eli stood by the window, his hands in his pockets, his gaze unfocused as it rested somewhere beyond the glass.Zurich moved.Cars passed.People walked.Lights flickered on and off in distant buildings.Everything carried on.Everything except him.For once, he wasn’t reading reports.Wasn’t analyzing.Wasn’t trying to force pieces together that refused to fit.He was just… there.Still.The sound of the door opening broke the silence.It was soft. Unhurried.Eli didn’t turn right away.A small part of him already assumed who it was.Selene.Back again.Either she had forgotten something—Or she wasn’t done trying to convince him.He exhaled quietly, already preparing a response he wasn’t sure he believed himself.“…You’re persi

The next few days didn’t follow a pattern.They didn’t need to.For once, Eli wasn’t measuring time in outcomes or deadlines, wasn’t splitting hours into things that mattered and things that didn’t. He wasn’t chasing anything, wasn’t running through possibilities in the background of every quiet moment.He was just… there.Moving through the day as it came.And somehow—That was enough.It started small, almost unnoticeable at first. Then, without him realizing it, it stopped being small at all.By the second day, he was standing at the edge of Uetliberg Mountain, the city stretching wide and steady beneath them, buildings layered into the distance like something carefully placed rather than something chaotic.Carlos stood beside him with the kind of satisfaction that suggested he’d personally arranged the entire view.“Tell me this isn’t worth waking up early for,” he said, hands on his hips.Eli didn’t answer immediately. The air felt different up there—clean in a way that didn’t re

For a moment—Eli didn’t move. It also took a moment for his brain to process thoughts and his body to react.Lyra was close again.Too close.Closer than before.There was something different in the air now—not just tension, not just control.Something unstable. Unpredictable.Her breath brushed lightly against his skin, her gaze locked onto his like she was searching for something deeper this time. Not just a reaction from Eli. Confirmation.And still— Eli didn’t move.But his mind—His mind wasn't sleeping anymore instead it was catching up… Fast.Too fast.The pieces didn’t align.They refused to.Siblings.The word still sat there, heavy, wrong—And yet— Her actions didn’t match it.Didn’t even come close.And that— That was the fracture.The split second where something inside him shifted.Because her very action held little to know truth about what she had said.And for an instance something passed through Eli's mind again.This wasn’t about family. This was something else.So