Chapter 60 The Silence That Smells Of Gunpowder

• ZOE
• I was running. The streets were soaked by a rain I didn’t remember starting. The pavement glistened under the streetlamps like a living, liquid, treacherous surface. Every step hurt, as if my bones wanted to shatter under their own weight. I didn’t know what I was running from, nor where I was going, but something in my chest pushed with a ferocious urgency, as if stopping would mean death. The air smelled of old gunpowder, as if the city had exploded years ago and no one had bothered to clean up the emotional rubble. My hands were trembling. They were stained. With blood? With dirt? I didn’t know. It made no sense, yet it felt so real I could even feel the cold licking at my bare ankles.
• Then I saw him. Standing at the corner, beneath a broken streetlamp, Dante was watching me in silence. His silhouette was outlined against the mist like a figure far too still, far too solid, as if he didn’t belong to this broken world. He wore his black coat open, his face covered in shadows, but his eyes… his eyes burned like glowing embers. I tried to call out to him, to shout his name, but my voice got trapped in my throat, mute, stuck like a scream that had been building for centuries. I walked toward him. Each step was harder than the last, as if the ground itself wanted to swallow me whole. Dante didn’t move. Not a gesture, not an advance. Only that fixed, wounded gaze, filled with something I couldn’t quite understand.