Theo stared at the ground as though she couldn't bear to watch them hear it, "Every day, I'd have to live and breathe and train and pretend that I was still a person. It was exhausting,"
Sylas's fingers curled into fists.
He could still see it.
Not clearly. Not as a memory he had lived through, but as the terrible image his mind was constructing from her words.
Theo alone.
Theo waking up to an empty world.
Theo with nobody to hold her when the nightmares came.
He had known she suffered.
He had known what Cain had done to her.
But he had never understood the full extent of what she had been forced to endure after they died.
Because they hadn't been there.
They hadn't been there to hold her.
They hadn't been there to tell her she was allowed to fall apart.
They hadn't been there to remind her that she didn't have to earn the right to keep living.
And now she was looking at them as though she had committed some unforgivable crime.
