Wedged between the winter coat and the vacuum cleaner. Hanger hooked in my hair. Blanket barely preserving what was left of my dignity.
“Hi,” I said.
“Get. Out.”
I extracted myself with the grace of a newborn deer. She pulled the hanger from my hair and threw it on the bed.
“In my defense...”
“There is no defense.” Low, controlled. “You scaled a military compound naked during a heightened security alert to knock on my window. After I told you not to.”
“Technically, you told me not to comeback. This is the first time. Preemptive disobedience, not repeated.”
Her jaw tightened. I shut up.
The room was small. She was close. The blanket smelled of her and my body was reacting in ways I couldn’t stop myself, which she could clearly see despite my best efforts with the fabric, and the muted bond pulsed between us with an insistence that made breathing difficult.
“Mira.” The humor left my voice. “I came because I need to say this to your face and not from behind a tree.”
Her arms crossed, posture bracing for impact.
“I’m sor...”
“Stop.”
The word echoed between us with the force of a closed door. Her expression didn’t shift, didn’t crack, didn’t give me a single inch to work with.
“You don’t get to do that here. Not in this room. Not now.” Her voice was steady but her hands were white-knuckled on her own arms. “You want to apologize? Fine. But an apology without change is just noise, Percy. And right now, all I’ve seen is you showing up where I told you not to.”
“That’s not fair. I don’t want to leave you.”
“But you did leave. Yes, you came back but youleft.None of this is fair.” Her chin lifted. “I was abandoned alone in a cabin with rejected bonds with barely an explanation. So you don’t getto climb through my window and fast-track this with a pretty speech in the dark.”
My throat closed. Every word I’d rehearsed in the tree line, every version of the apology I’d built and rebuilt over sleepless nights, none of it could survive the look on her face.
Not anger. Worse.
The tired, hollowed-out expression of a woman who’d already grieved me and wasn’t sure she had the energy to let me back.
“You need to eat more,” she said. Quieter now, changing the subject. Her eyes scanned my face, taking inventory. The weight I’d dropped, the shadows under my eyes, the beard. “When’s the last time you had a real meal?”
“Define real.”
“Percival.”
“Rabbits, mostly. And one fish that I caught and immediately felt guilty about.”
Her mouth trembled with the ghost of where a smile used to live. Without seeming to realize it, her fingers moved to the edge of the blanket at my shoulder, adjusting it where it had slipped. The touch was automatic, muscle memory from a life that used to include fixing my collar before I went to the station.
A thumb brushed the fabric. Then my collarbone beneath it. The bond ached, deep and structural. A foundation cracked but not collapsed.
She pulled her hand back. Caught herself.
“You can’t come here,” she said. Firm again. “The tree line is one thing. This is another. If I have to worry about you getting caught on top of everything else, I’ll break. And I can’t break right now.”
“I know.”
“So go. The camera resets soon.”
