Kallum was on his side, facing me. One arm across my waist, heavy and warm. Asleep, he looked different. The watchfulness was gone. The constant calculation behind his eyes, the way he tracked every movement in a room, the ghost always ready to disappear. None of that. Just a face. Gray skin and sharp features and the black sigils tracing his jaw, his throat, vanishing under the sheet.
Younger. He looked younger.
I touched one of the lines on his shoulder. Traced it down his arm, feeling the raised edge of it under my fingertip. He shiftedtoward me in his sleep, and his arm tightened around my waist. Instinct, not conscious thought. Like his body knew where I was even when his mind didn’t.
My chest did something complicated.
We’d talked about the claiming. The permanence of it. The bond that couldn’t be undone. He’d been careful to tell me I didn’t have to decide now, that there was no pressure. That wanting him didn’t mean wanting forever.
I’d listened. I hadn’t told him that I’d already decided.
His eyes opened. Red, unfocused for half a second. Then they found me, and something in his body unclenched. Not startled. Not reaching for a weapon. Just... settling. Like waking up next to someone was a language he was learning in real time.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi.” His voice was rough with sleep. His thumb moved against my hip, slow and absent. “How long have you been watching me?”
“Long enough to know you don’t snore.”
“I don’t do anything that makes noise. Professional hazard.”
I laughed. He almost smiled. That mouth-twitch I was starting to collect, each one proof that the ghost was real underneath all that training.
“We should get up,” I said.
“I know.”
Neither of us moved.
“Kallum.”
“I know.” He pulled me closer, pressed his mouth to my hair. Held me for three more breaths. Then he let go.
We dressed in silence. Not awkward silence. The kind where everything important had already been said and what was left was just the doing of it. Boots. Belts. Equipment checks. His hands moving over his gear with the same focus they’d moved over me hours ago.
He caught me watching. I didn’t look away.
“Be careful tonight,” I said. Not because he needed the reminder. Because I needed to say it.
“You, too.”
We walked out into the darkness. Separate directions. Separate stations.
The mission was waiting.
KALLUM
Midnight came too fast.
We’d spent the hour working with focus. Checking equipment. Running through the sequence one more time. Eating something that might have been stew. I don’t remember the taste. I remember her hands, passing me the bowl. The brush of her fingers against mine.
Small contacts. Deliberate ones. Neither of us saying what we were thinking.
This might be the last time.
It was time. I pulled on my jacket and checked my weapons. Rifle. Sidearm. Three knives. The blade she’d sharpened for me yesterday, still carrying the marks of the whetstone.
“Kallum.”
