The air in the crematorium was thick with incense and sorrow. Rowan stood frozen, his grief so consuming that reality blurred around him. Then — a flicker. A movement so small, so impossible, that his breath caught in his throat. Nyla’s belly. It shifted again, almost imperceptibly, beneath the ceremonial shroud.
For a heartbeat, Rowan thought it was a cruel trick of light, the mind’s desperate rebellion against loss. But instinct took hold before doubt could silence him. “Stop!” he shouted, his voice cutting through the priest’s low chant. The hall echoed with his cry, raw and panicked.
The priest halted, startled. Beatrice — composed and calculating even in grief — turned sharply toward Rowan. Her eyes widened, disbelief cracking through her polished exterior.
“Nyla!” Rowan’s voice broke as he reached her. His trembling hands tore back the shroud, and the room collectively gasped. Beneath the pale folds of fabric, a faint ripple moved again. Life — fragile but unmistakable.
The doctor who had overseen Nyla’s final moments was called forward, his face tightening with disbelief as he checked for a pulse. For a suspended second, the world stopped turning. Even the low hum of the furnace ceased.
Then came the words that shattered the silence: “She’s alive,” the doctor said, voice trembling. “Her pulse is faint, but it’s there. We need to get her to the hospital immediately.”
Gasps turned to chaos. Paramedics rushed in, lifting Nyla carefully as if she were made of glass. Rowan followed close, clutching her cold hand, whispering promises to hold on. Beatrice stood behind them, her face drained of color, eyes dark with something unreadable — shock, fear, or perhaps guilt.
As the ambulance doors slammed shut, Rowan’s heart pounded with a single, overwhelming truth: he had come within seconds of losing everything. But fate, it seemed, had intervened — and with it came both hope and reckoning.