ARIA POV
Lena didn’t move at first.
For a long second, I thought I had been too late anyway, that whatever Kara and I had pulled out of her system had come too close to the edge, that her body had taken the healing but not the will to come back with it, that maybe I had only delayed something inevitable, and something tight and ugly twisted in my chest because I couldn’t—wouldn’t—watch her slip away after all that, not after hearing her beg, not after seeing what they had already taken from her.
Then her fingers twitched, small and barely there, but I saw it.
My breath caught halfway in my throat as I watched her chest rise a little deeper this time, a little more controlled, like her lungs were remembering what they were supposed to do, like her body was relearning how to stay alive
