Morwenna turned her head slowly, her gaze sweeping across the table until it locked onto Valentina.
The silence that followed was deafening. It was a look forged in the fires of a forty-year history, a look that carried the crushing weight of their earlier conversation, the unspoken grievances, and the shared burdens of leadership.
But in this new, poisoned context, the look had transformed. It wasn't an offering of forgiveness, nor was it a demand for absolution.
It was something far more profound and far more unsettling: it was the look of a woman who had finally seen the architecture of a lie, a reconfiguration of the soul that occurs when a long-held truth is suddenly revealed to be a beautifully crafted deception.
Morwenna was seeing Valentina clearly for the first time, and the clarity was terrifying.
Valentina held the gaze. She did not blink, did not flinch, and did not offer the mercy of a downward glance.
