The room was draped in an oppressive silence, broken only by the low whistle of the wind bleeding through the window cracks. The dagger rested in Olivia's hand, cold and heavy like an unforgivable sin.
Its pale blade mirrored the ghost of the woman she had been mere minutes ago—a defeated soul who saw the edge of a blade as her only sanctuary. She stared into the steel for a long time, weighing her options between the biting chill of metal and the searing heat of revenge that Leon had planted in her mind like a poisonous seed.
Slowly, she pulled the blade away and set it on the side table. The resonance of metal hitting wood echoed like a warning shot—a cold declaration that the era of physical fragility had reached its end.
