Chapter 55She is Real
She is Real
Aslanov
I wake like I’m surfacing from something thick and black, lungs aching, muscles torn between fire and ice. My breath catches before it comes, my chest rising sharp against something tight, too tight.
I try to move.
I can’t.
A panic detonates somewhere deep in my ribs, spiraling up, clawing against the sedated weight of my limbs.
My hands, trapped. My legs, trapped. My wrists burn, and for a moment I think I’m back there, back in the dark with the lights and the screams and the steel bite of shackles carving into bone.
I thrash, no sound, just instinct, animal, feral.
But something stops me.
A weight.
Heavy.
Warm.
Not metal. Not leather. Soft.
It rests over my hand like a fallen wing. I turn my head, slowly, with effort like drowning, and the world stutters before it sharpens.
Red hair.
A mess of it, spilling like blood over the white sheet. Pale skin, still as death. Lips parted slightly, lashes dark against cheeks that shouldn’t be this color.
Her body is curled on the floor beside me, limp, almost folded. Her head lies just centimeters away from where my hand is strapped to the mattress.
Isabella .
My heart lurches so violently I think it might rip straight through the restraints. She looks asleep, but too still. Too quiet. My vision blurs, not from the liquids being poured into me but from something else; fear so intense it borders on grief.
I stretch my finger, as far as the restraint will allow. It’s nothing. A few inches. But I reach like it’s my last breath, until finally, finally, I touch her cheek.
Warm.
Real.
The breath leaves me in a soundless shudder. I trace the shape of her jaw with my trembling thumb, and something inside me crumbles. Her skin is cold, but not dead. Her presence isn’t a ghost. She’s here. Somehow, she’s here.
I don’t know how long I lie there, my thumb trembling against her cheek, afraid to move in case she vanishes.
The restraints bite gently into my wrists, too kind to be real, but I still test them like they’ll turn cruel if I breathe too loud. The sedatives weigh me down like wet chains, but they don’t dull everything. Not this. Not her.
My eyes drag across the ceiling. No lights. No mirrors.
No screaming. No interrogations or red bulbs casting war shadows on the walls. Just soft grey-blue—colors chosen on purpose.
The cot I’m strapped to isn’t metal. It doesn’t creak under my weight. The corners are rounded. No sharp edges.
A cage dressed as kindness.
But I know a cell when I see one.
My body tenses before my brain catches up. My breath hitches again, sharp, fractured. The panic claws, still hungry.
What has happened?
Where am I?
I try to lift my arms again, once. Twice. The restraints stretch, but they don’t let go. Not even a little.
A sound rips from my throat, raw and broken, but it dies in my chest when Isabella stirs.
I don’t want her seeing me like this.
Tethered. Cornered. Half-wild. Half-gone.
My breath stutters.
Something inside me buckles the moment I look at her— really look .
She’s pale. Not just tired, not just worn, but faded, like someone pressed life out of her with slow, invisible hands. Her freckles, usually scattered across her cheeks like stars in bloom, are dim now. Faint. Like they’re slipping into her skin to hide from the light.
Her face is thinner. Too thin. The delicate angles of her cheekbones have sharpened, as if the months carved at her while I wasn’t looking.
Her lips, once so full of soft words and sharper truths, are colorless, parted slightly with each shallow breath.
Her eyes are closed, lashes resting against skin that looks translucent in the wrong light.
I search for pink in her cheeks, but find only silence.
Even her hair, red as fire, alive with defiance, is dulled at the edges. Matted in places. Streaked with salt and sleep and something I can’t name. It spills over the sheets like a thread unraveling, one I’m terrified to tug in case she comes undone.
I don’t recognize this version of her. And it guts me.
Because I did this.
Not with my hands, not with intention, but with every shadow I dragged behind me. With every day I wasn’t here. With every wound I thought I could protect her from by staying silent. And she followed anyway. Into the dark. Into me .
I feel the pressure building behind my eyes again, but I don’t blink.
If I blink, she might change again. Vanish. Fracture.
She might dissolve again, a dream.
She’s lying there, inches from my hand, and somehow still out of reach. Still curled in a shape that screams of endurance, of someone who stayed too long in a place that didn’t love her back.
A quiet whimper escapes my throat. I don’t mean to make it. I barely even feel it leave. But once it does, the rest of it comes unfastened.
My chest shakes.
My jaw clenches, but it can’t hold the grief in.
She’s here, and it still feels like I’m losing her.
Tears burn hot down the sides of my face, silent, shamed. My body writhes once—just once—against the restraints, a last-ditch effort to feel something other than helpless.
I’d bleed myself dry if it could put color back in her cheeks. If it could feed the freckles. If it could take the ache out of her bones and bury it in mine instead.
I whisper her name again, but it shatters halfway out.
“Isa…”
The rest breaks on a sob I can’t stop. My shoulders quake. My breath comes in pieces. Ugly. Human.
The boy inside of me, who has begged me for a decade to let him free, wins.
He cries, like he has never done before.
He breaks.
Her lashes flutter.
And then her eyes.
God.
Those eyes.
Brown like wild things and soft things and every place we never got to go. They lock on me with a force that makes it hard to breathe, wide and desperate, glassed over with tears before her lips even move.
She sees me.
And she breaks.
A sob tears from her throat, and her whole body jerks toward me, as close as she can get. Until she’s tucked against the side of the bed, her hair tangling in at the sides, her hands fumbling for my arm like she doesn’t know if I’m real.
Then—barely a breath—
“Aslanov…”
My name breaks from her lips like something sacred. Cracked open. Barely holding together.
She finds my hand, still pinned under the strap, and curls both of hers around it like it’s the only thing in the world that matters.
She presses her forehead to my fingers, lets out a sound that sounds more like grief than relief.
Her tears spill fast, no hesitation now, no walls. Just open heartbreak.
I’m crying too.
I can’t stop.
She holds my hand like I’m the one who’s dying, and all I can think is how small her grip feels. How thin she is. Her bones under her skin like paper and shadow, and her face—too pale, too hollow.
“I thought I lost you,” she cries, voice trembling against my skin.
My throat is raw. My voice barely scrapes through.
‘‘I’m here, solnyshko .’’
She sobs. Loud, aching, real. Her shoulders shake with it, her ribs pulling tight with every sound. It’s not the kind of crying you can hide. It’s the kind that splits you open.
“I thought I’d never hear your voice again,” she chokes out, broken around the syllables.
“You’re hearing it now,” I rasp, voice shredded from disuse and grief and too many nights spent silent in the dark. I swallow hard.
Her tears fall harder, warm drops hitting my skin like rain. Her forehead presses to our joined hands again, her breath coming fast and uneven.
“Are you…” she swallows, barely able to say it. “Are you in pain?”
I don’t answer right away.
Because how do I explain that it’s not the restraints, or the bruises, or the cold itch of sedation still crawling through my veins?
It’s her .
It’s seeing her like this.
I don’t care about myself, the physical pain, or the psychological issues.
“It hurts,” I say finally, barely a whisper.
She pulls back just enough to look me in the eyes—those wide, desperate eyes, still clouded with unshed tears. Her brow furrows, instinctively searching for the source of the pain, her hands reaching to touch my chest, my arms, looking for something she can fix.
“Where?” she asks, her voice soft but urgent, her fingers trembling as they hover over me. “Where does it hurt?”
‘‘My heart.’’