POV: Draco and Lucen (Alternating)
They watch her choose Kai. And realize they lost nothing.
DRACO
Aphrodite is in my arms and she's not holding anything up right now.
That's the thing I'm sitting with, the specific quality of her in this moment that is different from every other moment I've held her or been close to her since this journey started. She always holds something up. Even in the ruins when the blood-locked vision showed her what her father's disappearance actually was, even at the bottom of the chasm with cracked stone around her and Kai unconscious beside her, even in the first sighting of the King in the forest — she holds the thing that needs holding. The Direwolf blood and the leadership she's been building and the weight of what she came here to do, she holds all of it even in the moments when the holding is costing the most.
Right now she's not holding any of it.
