KNOX’S POV
I turn my attention entirely to her, pulling her spiralling focus to me.
“I’m here. Look at me. Eyes on me, Ember. I’m here. I’m so sorry.”
She looks at me, and the look breaks something in my chest that I didn’t know was still intact.
She’s been holding it together.
Through the arrows and the siege and the gunshots and the dying and the man she used to be married to being executed in front of her, and her father taking a bullet that was meant for someone else.
She’s been holding it all together because there was nobody here to hold it for her, and the walls she built to survive this moment are good, strong walls, the kind of walls you build when your childhood teaches you that falling apart is a luxury.
But I’m here now. And my presence is the permission she’s been waiti
