"Okay?"
"Okay. I'll stay."
She kisses me, right there with the settlement watching. It's not romantic. It's bloody and messy and tastes like survival.
It's a promise.
I let Dr. Nowak stitch my wounds while Allie hovers nearby, asking a thousand questions about how deep the cuts are and whether she can see the stitches go in. Iris finally shoos her away, but not before Allie extracts a promise that I'll show her the scars when they heal.
"Battle scars are cool," she informs me solemnly. "Way cooler than tattoos."
"I'll keep that in mind."
By evening, the adrenaline has faded and exhaustion has set in. Allie falls asleep early, worn out from the excitement, and the settlement grows quiet around us.
Iris finds me on her front porch, watching the stars.
"Can't sleep?" she asks.
"Don't want to." I shake my head. "Every time I close my eyes, I see Bull's face. The moment the blade went in. The surprise."
She sits beside me, close enough that our shoulders touch. "Does it bother you? Killing him?"
"No. That's what bothers me." I stare at my hands. They’re clean now, but I can still feel the sticky dried blood. "He was mybrother once. Rode with him for years. And I felt nothing when I killed him."
"You felt something," Iris says quietly. "You just haven't figured out what yet."
Maybe she's right. Maybe the numbness is its own kind of grief—mourning the man Bull used to be before the apocalypse twisted him into something unrecognizable. Before it twisted all of them.
"Come inside," Iris says after a long silence. "Come to bed."
"Iris."
"Not for that. Not tonight." She takes my hand. "Just... come inside. Let me hold you. Let me remind you that you're not alone anymore."
I follow her into the house, into her bedroom, into her bed. We undress in the dark—not with urgency, but with quiet exhaustion. She curls against my side, her head on my chest, her arm across my stomach.
"Thank you," I whisper.
"For what?"
"Seeing something worth saving when I couldn't."
Her hand finds mine in the darkness. Squeezes.
We fall asleep like that, tangled together, and for the first time in three years, I don't dream about the people I've lost.
I dream about the ones I've found.
nine
Stephan
Aweeklater,Iwake to sunlight streaming through Iris's window and Allie's voice demanding breakfast.
The wounds have started to heal. The settlement has returned to its normal rhythms. And somewhere in the past seven days, this place stopped feeling like a temporary stop and started feeling like home.
Iris is already up, arguing with Allie about whether chocolate, scavenged from a trader last month, counts as a breakfast food.
