[center][img]https://i.imgur.com/nau2DX2.png[/img][/center]

[H1][Center]•┈••✦✩𝓔𝓿𝓲𝓮✩✦••┈•[/center][/H1]

Evie’s sneakers whispered over the black-glass floor, each step sending a faint ripple through their hundred reflections. The journey’s blur still clung to her—stale torch smoke in her throat, sleep grit at the corners of her eyes, the sweet-sour tang of the mist sitting wrong in her lungs. She rolled her shoulders once, easing the ache that had settled there somewhere between “hours” and “days.”

Roscoe eased in tight at her knee, hackles a low ridge, lips closed over a steady, warning hum. Evie kept her bat down along her thigh, grip loose, stance squared—nonthreatening, not careless. She lifted her chin just enough to meet the water-born gaze on the throne.

[color=#697DFF]“You’re not wrong about one thing,”[/color] she said, voice even, carrying. [color=#697DFF]“These walls will catch a lie and throw it back at you forever. So I won’t feed you one.”[/color]

She took a slow step closer; their reflections followed, a hall of echoes.

[color=#697DFF]“We came for Kavros Dern. Your old boss asked for him back—alive—because there are words left between them that need saying. That’s the truth.”[/color]

Her eyes flicked to the hands and faces ghosting under the glass, then back.

[color=#697DFF]“I’m a medic. I don’t pick fights I don’t have to. If you’re Kavros—or guarding him—then you know how this ends if we all dig in.”[/color] A beat. [color=#697DFF]“It doesn’t have to.”[/color]

She shifted her weight, angling her body just a hair so Roscoe had the throne and the periphery both in his arc. The wolfdog’s tail stayed low, his mismatched eyes locked, waiting for a word.

[color=#697DFF]“We walk you out. You breathe air that isn’t laced with grief. You get your talk. Nobody bleeds.”[/color] She tapped the bat’s cap lightly against the mirrored floor—tick—not a threat, a metronome.

[color=#697DFF]“Or—”[/color] her tone never rose, [color=#697DFF]“we do this the hard way, and this place remembers that, too.”[/color]

Another step. Calm. Ready.

[color=#697DFF]“So I’m speaking carefully. Tell me straight: are you going to let us bring you to him alive… or are you about to make me prove I meant every word?”[/color]