“You know I’m not going to do that.”
“Then we understand each other.”
She held out her hand. An offer. A challenge.
I took it. Let her grip tighten on mine. Let her pull me forward until I was standing closer than I needed to be, close enough to see the flecks of gold in her green eyes, close enough to count the freckles scattered across her nose.
“Why?” The word came out rougher than I intended. “Why stay? You barely know me.”
She didn’t answer immediately. Her hand was still in mine. She looked down at our joined fingers, and something moved across her face. Something she was deciding whether to say.
I waited. Patient. The same patience I used on a rooftop, waiting for a target to appear. But this was different. This mattered in a way that missions didn’t.
She took a breath. Let it out slowly.
“I’ve known men my whole life who talked about honor.” Her voice was quiet. Steady, but quiet. “Men who made promises and speeches and grand declarations. And then when things got hard, when there was a cost to be paid, they disappeared. They found reasons. They found excuses. They left.”
She looked up. Met my eyes.
“You’ve been here for days. You’ve bled for a place that isn’t yours. You’ve built defenses and laid traps and stood watch in the dark for a woman you don’t know, for a mission that might kill you.” Her grip tightened on my hand. “You haven’t asked for anything. You haven’t demanded anything. You just... stayed.”
The words landed somewhere deep in my chest. Somewhere I didn’t let people reach.
“Torek trusted you,” she said. “That’s enough for me.”
I didn’t know what to say. Didn’t know how to hold what she’d given me. This woman who’d watched men leave her whole life, who’d learned not to expect anything, who was standing in a field full of death and telling me that my presence meant something.
The warmth in my chest wasn’t dangerous anymore. It was just there. Real. Taking up space.
“Don’t thank me yet.” Her voice had gone rougher. Something raw underneath the steadiness. “We still have to survive tonight.”
She let go of my hand. The cold rushed in where her warmth had been.
She turned toward the farmhouse. Turnip appeared from somewhere, falling into step beside her.
I didn’t watch her go. I made myself look down at my hands instead. At the palm she’d gripped. At the fingers that still felt the echo of her warmth.
I pressed my hand flat against the fence post beside me. Cold wood. Rough grain. Solid.
It didn’t help.
I stood in the field with the morning sun on my back and the cold in my hand where her warmth had been, and I thought about what it meant to stay.
Then I went back to work.
There were traps to finish, and tonight was coming, and I had something to protect now that I hadn’t had five days ago.
Something that mattered.
ANHARA
Ichopped vegetables because my hands needed something to do.
The knife came down hard on the cutting board. Carrots from the cold cellar, still crisp from winter storage. I’d brought them up this morning, before dawn, before the bodies in the field had been fully visible. Something to focus on. Something that made sense.
Chop. Chop. Chop.
The problem kept running through my head like water through a cracked dam. No matter how many times I pushed it away, it seeped back in.
