Chapter 35
The Crime of Normalcy
Elara
I wake to quiet.
For a moment I don’t know where I am. The ceiling is unfamiliar. The light is wrong. Then I turn my head and see the clock on the bedside table.
1:04 PM.
I stare at it, stunned. I haven’t slept that long in years.
Not without interruption. Not without waking with my heart already sprinting.
My body feels heavy, but not in the suffocating way it did yesterday.
More like gravity has returned to a tolerable level.
My head is quieter. Not empty. Just… navigable.
I shift slightly, and the sheets move with me. They smell like him.
Not cologne. Not anything deliberate. Skin.
Fabric. Something clean and restrained, threaded with a faint metallic note I can’t quite place.
It grounds me in a way I don’t want to examine too closely.
I lie there longer than necessary, breathing it in, letting my nervous system catalog the familiarity.
I wonder, briefly, what he thinks about after killing someone.
Not during. After.
I wonder if his mind goes silent the way mine finally did last night.
If he lies here, where I am now, and sorts through logistics, through aftermath, through the quiet satisfaction of completion.
Or if he doesn’t think at all. If sleep just comes, uncomplicated, because nothing inside him resists it.
The thought should terrify me.
It doesn’t.
That realization sits in my chest, neutral and unsettling.
I swing my legs over the side of the bed and stand. My body feels steadier than it has in days. Weeks, maybe. I pull the sweatshirt tighter around me and pad out into the main area of the bunker.
Lucan isn’t there.
The central space is still, lights dimmed. His workspace door is locked down, sealed in a way that tells me he didn’t just step out for a moment. He’s gone. The realization sends a thin line of cold through my spine.
I try not to think about where he might have gone.
I fail.
Is he hunting? Is someone else dead right now who wasn’t this morning? Has someone stopped breathing in the hours I was unconscious, my body wrapped in his sheets while he did what he does best? Is he still busy with my contract?
I don’t know why this is the thought that surfaces first, but it does, sharp and intrusive. I move toward the kitchenette on autopilot, needing something warm to hold. I fill the kettle, set it on the heat, and wait. My hands are steady. That’s new.
When the water’s ready, I pour it over a tea bag and watch the color bleed slowly into the cup. My eyes keep drifting to the hatch above, to the heavy metal circle that separates this place from the world above.
The sound comes without warning.
Metal on metal. The low, familiar complaint of the hatch opening.
I freeze, cup halfway to my mouth.
Lucan climbs inside, the cold following him in like a living thing. He’s carrying a paper bag in one hand, another tucked under his arm. The smell hits me a second later; warm bread, sugar, butter. Something sweet and yeasted and obscene in its normalcy.
Bakery goods.
I stare at the bags. Then at him. Then, stupidly, back at the hatch, now closed behind him.
He notices. Of course he does.
“You sleep well?” he asks, setting the bags down on the counter.
“Yes,” I say, and I mean it. The word feels strange on my tongue. Honest. “Too well.”
“Good.” He watches me over the rim of the counter, assessing. “You look clearer.”
“I feel clearer,” I admit. “Less… fogged.”
He nods once, like that was the intended outcome.
I take a sip of my tea. It tastes faintly of chamomile and something else, something grounding. “Where did you go?” I ask before I can stop myself.
He doesn’t answer immediately. He starts unpacking the bags instead, laying out pastries with the same precision he applies to everything else. Croissants. Dark bread. Something filled with jam. When he finally looks at me, his gaze is steady.
“Out,” he says.
I swallow. “Did you—”
“No,” he interrupts calmly.
The relief is immediate and humiliating. I don’t try to hide it. He sees it anyway.
I’m still staring at the hatch when he speaks again. “Do you want to go outside?”
The question catches me off guard so completely that my breath stutters.
“Outside?” I repeat.
“Yes.”
My eyes light up before I can rein them in. “Can I?”
He studies me for a long moment. Not my face—my posture, my breathing, the way my weight rests evenly on my feet. “Are you going to try anything stupid?”
“No,” I say immediately. The word comes out clean. Certain. “I won’t.”
He holds my gaze for another beat, then nods. “Get dressed, and eat.”
I move fast, stuffing my face with the jam filled croissant, heart hammering with something dangerously close to joy. Once I’m finished he hands me a warm jacket, heavy boots. I shrug into them, clumsy with anticipation. When the hatch opens again, cold air rushes in, sharp and biting.
I climb the ladder first.
The impact is immediate. Cold slaps my face, my lungs, my eyes.
Light, real light, hits me like a physical force.
It’s dimmed already, darkness creeping in at early hours this time a year.
My vision blurs anyway, tears springing instantly to my eyes.
I laugh, the sound ripping out of me before I can stop it, half pain, half something else entirely.
My icy blue eyes ache as they adjust, but I don’t look away. I let it hurt. I let it remind me I’m alive.
Snow stretches out in every direction, thick and untouched, the world reduced to white and slate and pale winter sky. I sit down without thinking, right in the snow, the cold seeping through my clothes, grounding me instantly. I breathe in deeply.
The air is clean. Brutal. Honest.
Lucan watches me from a few steps away, his expression unreadable. I don’t care. I tilt my head back and let the cold burn my lungs, let the silence of the fjord settle around us.
“Thank you,” I say quietly.
He nods, once.
We walk in parallel for a while, close enough that our bodies almost touch, far enough that the space between us still feels deliberate.
Our boots crunch softly through the snow, the sound rhythmic, grounding.
The fjord opens up ahead of us, dark water cutting through the white like a wound that never heals, steam curling faintly where cold air meets something that refuses to freeze.
“It’s strange,” I say after a moment. My breath fogs in front of me. “How quiet it is. Not empty. Just… uninterested in us.”
Lucan glances at the water. “Nature doesn’t care about witnesses,” he says. “That’s part of its honesty.”
I nod. “That’s why I like it.”
He hums, noncommittal.
We stop near the edge where the snow thickens again, untouched, pristine. I look down at it, then back up at him, a thought forming before I give myself time to censor it.
“We could make a snow angel,” I say.
He stops walking.
“No,” he says immediately. Flat. Absolute.
I grin. “You didn’t even think about it.”
“There is nothing to think about.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m not lying down in the snow,” he says, like he’s explaining something obvious to a child. “And I don’t make angels.”
“That tracks,” I say cheerfully.
Before he can stop me, or decide whether he even wants to, I drop backward into the snow. The cold punches the air out of my lungs as it seeps through my jacket, shocking and perfect. I laugh again, breathless, arms flinging out wide as I move them up and down, legs sweeping apart and together.
Snow dusts my hair, my sleeves, my lashes.
I look up at the sky and feel ridiculous and free and alive in a way that has nothing to do with survival.
Lucan doesn’t move.
I turn my head to look at him. He’s standing there, tall and still, watching me like I’ve just committed a small, incomprehensible crime. His expression is tight, conflicted, as if he’s assessing risk where there is none.
“What?” I ask, still moving my arms.
“You’re freezing,” he says.
“I know.”
“You’re going to soak through.”
“I know.”
“You’re—” He stops himself, jaw tightening.
I smile up at him. “Come on.”
“No.”
“You never have fun,” I accuse lightly.
“This,” he says, gesturing at me with one gloved hand, “is not my type of fun.”
“Doesn’t make you happy?” I ask.
“No,” he says without hesitation.
I slow my movements, then stop, lying there with my arms outstretched, snow angel half-formed beneath me. I look at him, really look at him, standing there against all that white like he was carved into the landscape rather than placed in it.
“It would make me happy,” I say.
The words hang there, simple and unguarded.
He doesn’t respond right away.
He looks away toward the fjord, then back at me, then down at the snow at his feet. I can almost see the calculation happening—the internal resistance, the instinct to refuse anything unstructured, unproductive, unarmed.
He exhales sharply.
Then he groans. Low. Irritated. Like someone conceding a battle they never wanted to fight.
“I cannot believe I’m doing this,” he mutters.
He lowers himself carefully, stiffly, like the ground might betray him if he moves too fast. When he finally lies back beside me, the snow crunches loudly under his weight. He stares straight up at the sky, jaw clenched, breath controlled.
“This is ridiculous,” he adds.
I grin so hard my cheeks hurt. “Move your arms.”
“I will not.”
“You have to, or it’s not an angel.”
“I don’t care.”
I reach over and nudge his sleeve with my gloved hand. “Lucan.”
He closes his eyes for a brief, suffering second. Then, with visible reluctance, he lifts his arms and moves them once. Stiff. Awkward. Completely wrong.
I laugh again, full and unrestrained. “Wow. You’re terrible at this.”
“I kill people efficiently,” he says flatly. “This is not a transferable skill set.”
Snow clings to his coat, his hair dusted white at the edges, blending in with his white strand of hair. He looks absurd. And human. And so out of place that my chest aches with it.
We lie there for a moment longer, two dark shapes against the white, our breath rising into the dimming sky as the light fades further, the darkness of winter creeping in.