Her breathing evens out as sleep claims her, but I feel the way her hand has curled into my shirt. Unconscious. Trusting.
I sit very still, hyperaware of every point where our bodies meet. The weight of her against my chest. The rise and fall of her breath. The heat we generate together in this small shelter against the mountain cold.
My mind should be on practical things. Routes. Dangers. The operatives still searching below.
Instead, I’m absorbing the exact texture of her hair where it brushes my jaw. The way her pulse flutters against my forearm. The small sound she makes when she settles deeper into sleep—contentment, almost. Safety.
It feels right. Natural. Like my body can remember what my mind can’t access.
I’ve held someone before.
The knowledge arrives with absolute certainty, accompanied by a hollow ache beneath my ribs. Not pain, exactly. Something closer to absence. A space where memory should live but doesn’t.
Who?
I close my eyes, searching for the shape of her. Try to pull detail from the void.
Rain. And ash.
The scent slams into me—so vivid I taste smoke on my tongue, feel cool droplets on my face. Phantom sensations that make my chest constrict.
I held someone who smelled of rain and ash.
Someone whose—
The image wavers. I reach for it desperately, but it’s like grasping mist. The harder I try to hold it, the faster it dissipates.
Gone.
The word echoes through the emptiness where the memory should be. Definite. Final. Not lost or missing butgone.
The ache sharpens, becomes almost physical. Loss so profound my chest can’t contain it.
I force my eyes open, force myself back to now. To Mara’s weight against me, her steady breathing, the mountain cold I barely feel.
Not her. Mara smells… alive.
The woman in my memory smelled of endings.
I don’t understand what that means. Don’t know if the memory is real or manufactured by a mind desperate to fill its own blanks.
But the hollow ache remains. Proof of something. Evidence of loss I can’t quantify.
Whoever she was—if she was—she’s gone.
And somehow, impossibly, I’m still here.
Holding someone else.
The guilt that follows is irrational. Mara is not a replacement or consolation. She’s simply a woman who needs warmth, and I’m providing it.
Nothing more.
Yet my body knows how to hold her. Knows where to place my hands, how to curve myself around her, the exact pressure needed to offer comfort without constraint.
And that knowing feels like betrayal of something I can’t remember.
I look down at her sleeping face. Peaceful in firelight. Trusting in ways she probably shouldn’t be.
