Tonight, in the dark, I let myself wonder what it would mean to stop lying.
His hand on mine. His fingers tracing patterns across my skin. The heat that built between us and the careful withdrawal that ended it.
His back is to me.His posture is rigid, controlled, revealing nothing of the heat that passed between us last night.
But when I rise and move to his side, his hand finds the small of my back—brief, guiding, steadying me as I navigate the uneven ground.
The touch lingers a heartbeat longer than necessary.
We walk out of Niren Hollow as the sun rises over a city of the dead, and we don’t speak of what passed between us in the dark. The silence holds its own kind of conversation.
The road ahead leads to the forward camps. To Arax’s people. To a reckoning I can’t predict.
