I look at the compad screen, then back at him. The thought slips out before I can stop it.
“My father died when I was eight,” I say, not looking at him directly. Instead, I stare at the small pile of stones beside us—pebbles I collected on the trails.
“He died in a car crash,” I continue. “Mom never really recovered. My sisters… they learned how to hold their grief like armor. But I… I just got quiet. I learned to make myself small.”
A quiet breath escapes me.
“I always thought people looked right through me,” I say, eyes fixed forward. “Like I existed in some forgotten corner of the world. My teachers ignored me. My classmates didn’t see me. My siblings—they each had their own space in the world, and I just… floated between.”
I turn my gaze toward Maug—not full on, not directly, but enough that the corner of my eye catches the flare in his amber gaze.
He doesn’t look away. Not even once.
Then he says it—in that deep, gravel-toned voice that feels like thunder settling into bone:
“They were fools.”
Just those words—simple, blunt, unabashed—but there’s something in the way he says them that feels like protection. Like he believes me in a way no one else ever did.
That moment—small, unassuming, like two stones rubbing together—is like lightning under skin.
I don’t correct him. I don’t argue. I just meet his gaze and let the half-light settle between us. Because for the first time, I’m not explaining myself to survive. I’m explaining myself to be known.
And that matters more than I can say.
He shifts, just a slight motion—barely noticeable—but in it, there’s a willingness to be considered, to be invited into this fragile circle of trust.
I rest my hand near his; not touching him yet—just near—and realize I am no longer afraid.
Not of him. Not of the silence. Not of the unsaid things thickening the air between us.
CHAPTER 22
MAUG
Ishouldn’t want to touch her.
Not ever.
Not like this.
Not after every vow I ever made was carved into silence and solitude. I’m old enough to remember the faces I’ve lost, the lives I can’t undo, and the cruelty this world trades as currency.
I should not feel this way.
But here she lies, curled beside me, and every fiber of me aches in an ancient, unfamiliar way I haven’t felt since before the war — before the centuries of exile — before the world decided my only place was silence.
She sleeps just a few breaths away, tucked under the shared thermal wrap we’ve learned to share like beaters of hearth-fire in a frozen world. Her body rises and falls in that slow rhythm that should be mundane, but to me it ishypnotic. A cadence that draws the eye, demands the breath, holds the space between inhalation and exhalation like a presence in itself.
The dome around us is silent, save for the distant groan of wind as it rattles the outer stone. There’s a hush here — not emptiness, butpressure, like the rocks themselves lean in tolisten. I’m beneath the rough blanket of that hush, half-shadow, half-heat, all tension.
I stare at her.
Not out of fear.
Not out of danger.
But out of something far more terrifying: hope.
