REBORN AMIDST RUINS
The dawn had dressed the city in a thick veil of fog, as if the whole world was holding its breath, waiting for Ana's next step.
Her hands trembled as she held the doorknob of the back door of the Vasiliev mansion, the same one she had crossed being barely a shadow, a whisper of what once was. Now, he was leaving. Not running away, not begging. She was leaving with steady feet and a broken gaze... but hers.
The mansion slept. The echo of footsteps in the corridors did not haunt her. Viktoria was far away, facing the consequences of her sins. Lucian's wife had been consumed in her own rage. And Lucian... Lucian was no longer her jailer. Nor was he her salvation. It was a story with no end point, a name that still burned in his chest but no longer governed his decisions.
He crossed the garden without looking back. The dew of dawn clung to her shoes and the cold air hit her like a slap in the face. She felt lonely, yes. But for the first time in a long time, that loneliness was not a prison... it was a possibility.
As she reached the road that snaked out of the Vasiliev grounds, she stopped. He closed his eyes. Inhaled. Exhaled. Something inside her broke into silence. Not a scream, not a tear. Just a dense, deep silence that spoke volumes.
She was free.
But freedom was an abyss.
For so long she had lived under the control of others-her father, Viktoria, Lucian-that now, with no one telling her what to do or what to feel, she felt lost. The world was huge, and Anne was tiny. Where was a butterfly with broken wings going?
She wandered aimlessly for hours, with a borrowed backpack and empty pockets. She ended up at a train station, where the hustle and bustle of strangers hit her hard. Laughter, arguments, loudspeaker announcements. All so alien. So far away.
She bought a random ticket. A random address.
He sat down by the window. He pressed his coat to his chest. The train started. And at that moment, for the first time since she crossed the doors of the mansion, Ana cried. She cried like an abandoned child. She cried like a wounded woman. She cried because she knew that, although she had escaped, she was not yet free.
True cages do not have bars. They live in the mind, in memory, in the words we believed when we didn't know how to defend ourselves. And Ana had many of those.
But she also had something else: courage.
The train moved forward. The landscape changed, and with each kilometer, the last invisible threads of her prison were unraveling, one by one.
She didn't know where this journey would take her.
She only knew one thing:
It was her life, at last. And she was going to reclaim it.