She starts to sit up. I don’t let her.
My arm bands around her waist, yanks her back down against me. Hard. Possessive.
“Stay.”
She makes a soft sound, half laugh, half huff, but settles again, warm and damp against my side. For a second I think she’ll curl into me.
She doesn’t.
Instead, she rolls onto her back beside me, shoulder brushing mine, and tips her face up toward the night sky. One boot bent at the knee, hair full of leaves. Dirt streaks her thighs.
We lie there breathing.
My heart still hasn’t come down. Neither has my head.
Ayla turns her face slightly toward me, then back to the trees. “So we’re just going to lay here in the dirt?”
“For a minute.”
She snorts softly. “Romantic.”
I almost laugh.
Silence stretches again. The night presses in around us, all pine and cold air and the lingering scent of sex and blood. Her fingers twitch once against her stomach like she wants to move, wants to fill the quiet with something sharp or careless.
Before she can, I say, “Remember when I told you about my parents?”
She turns her head fully this time. “About them being stepsiblings?” She inhales. “Is this really the conversation we’re having right now?”
“Yes.”
That gets a small incredulous laugh out of her. She folds her arms over her chest. “All right, Pakhan. Go on.”
I reach for her hand, uncurl her fingers one by one and drag her palm across my sternum until it rests over one of the scars there.
She goes still.
“You feel that?”
Her fingertips brush the puckered skin. “It feels like a bullet wound.”
“It is.”
Ayla lifts herself slightly on one elbow, peering down at my chest. Moonlight catches in her eyes as she studies the scar, then the others, then this one again.
“That’s not the one I patched up,” she says.
“No.”
Her gaze flicks to mine.
“This one my father gave me.”
The teasing leaves her face.
She pushes up higher, looking at me properly now. “Your father shot you?”
“There’s one on my back too.”
