Chapter 9
Auralia
I woke to the wrong angle of light.
For a disoriented moment, I couldn't place myself.
The sheets were too smooth—high thread count, the kind I'd never bothered to buy for my own bed.
The pillow smelled like nothing, which was wrong.
My pillow smelled like lavender and Ghost and the musty sweetness of my building's ancient heating system.
Then it all came back.
Maks's apartment. The violence. Two men on the pavement, and the sound—that sound—of something essential being broken. The conversation on the couch that had lasted until three in the morning. His thumb tracing my cheekbone like I was something precious he was afraid to damage.
My chest did something complicated. Part relief, part terror, part a wanting so sharp it felt like a physical wound.
I was wearing his sweater.
The realization arrived slowly, my sleep-foggy brain catching up to what my body already knew.
Soft charcoal cashmere, too big for me, the sleeves hanging past my fingertips.
I'd put it on last night because it was there, because he'd left it for me, because some desperate part of me had needed to be wrapped in something that belonged to him.
Now, in the thin morning light, I buried my nose in the collar like a child seeking comfort.
He smelled like cedar and something else. Something warm and slightly sharp that I couldn't name but recognized instantly—the scent that had wrapped around me when I'd fallen into his arms at the gallery. The scent I'd been trying not to think about for three days, and failing.
I breathed him in. Let my eyes close. Let myself have this one small, private moment of weakness.
The apartment was alive with sensation.
Coffee—I could smell it now, rich and dark, bleeding through the walls from somewhere beyond the guest room door.
Something cooking. Eggs, maybe, or bacon.
The sizzle of fat in a pan. And underneath it all, barely audible, the soft shuffle of someone moving in a kitchen with the unhurried confidence of a person who belonged there.
Maks was awake. Maks was cooking breakfast. Maks was out there, thirty feet away, doing something domestic and ordinary while I lay in his guest bed wearing his sweater and trying to remember how to be a person.
Not just Maks. Victor Harmin. Lis, too.
Ghost wasn't in the room.
I noticed it suddenly—the absence of his familiar weight at the foot of the bed, the silence where his breathing should have been.
The traitor had probably already defected to whoever was making food.
Four years of loyalty, of being my anxious shadow, of refusing to let anyone except me close enough to touch him, and he'd abandoned me for a man with a spatula and a warm kitchen.
I couldn't even blame him. Some part of me wanted to do the same thing.
I lay still for a long moment, cataloging my body the way my therapist had taught me. Start with the extremities. Work inward. Name what you're feeling.
Exhausted. That was the big one—a bone-deep tiredness that went beyond sleep, beyond physical. The kind of exhaustion that came from running on adrenaline for forty-eight hours and then crashing hard.
Achy. My shoulders, my neck, the small of my back. Tension held too long in too many muscles, now screaming in protest.
Strung tight with something I didn't want to name.
The last one was harder to pin down. It wasn't quite anxiety—I knew anxiety, had lived with it for thirty years, could recognize its flavor by now. This was different. Sharper. More focused.
Want.
The word arrived unbidden, and I flinched away from it.
But my body remembered anyway. My body remembered the way he'd said "Good girl" last night—quiet, warm, the exact tone he'd used a hundred times in our Discord conversations.
Two words. Just two words, and something in my chest had cracked open, had softened, had responded with a desperate, instinctive surrender.
I'd felt it in my shoulders. In my jaw. In the loosening of muscles I hadn't realized I'd been clenching.
The whole architecture of my anxiety had shifted at the sound of his voice, rearranging itself around those two small words like they were a key to something I'd been trying to unlock my entire life.
Good girl.
He'd touched my face.
I pressed my palms against my eyes, trying to block out the memory, but it was too late. I could still feel the ghost of his fingers on my cheek. The roughness of his thumb. The way he'd held me—gentle, careful, like I was something fragile and precious and worth handling with care.
And then he'd let go.
The letting go was the part that kept catching in my chest. Not because it hurt—though it did, a little, in ways I wasn't ready to examine. But because of what it meant. What he was telling me without words.
Your choice. This has to be your choice.
He could have kissed me. I'd seen it in his eyes—the wanting, raw and desperate and barely controlled. He'd been close enough that I could feel his breath on my lips, close enough that one small movement would have closed the distance.
But he hadn't. He'd held my face and looked at me like I was the only real thing in the world, and then he'd stepped back. Given me space. Let me decide.
The restraint felt like both gift and loss.
I wanted to see him, so I plucked up the courage and got out of bed.
I followed the sounds of cooking, one hand trailing along the wall for balance I didn't quite need but wanted anyway.
The hardwood was cool beneath my bare feet.
The light from the floor-to-ceiling windows was thin and grey—overcast day, maybe, or early enough that the sun hadn't fully committed to rising.
The kitchen opened up at the end of the hall, all clean lines and expensive appliances, the kind of space I'd only ever seen in design magazines and the apartments of people who hired me to authenticate their collections.
Maks stood at the stove with his back to me.
He was wearing different clothes than last night—soft grey t-shirt, worn jeans that sat low on his hips.
His feet were bare. The domesticity of it hit me somewhere unexpected, a sharp little ache in my chest. This was what he looked like in the morning.
This was what he looked like when he wasn't being the Fox, or the bratva officer, or the man with blood on his hands.
Ghost lay sprawled at his feet like he'd lived here forever.
My ridiculous, anxious, trauma-survivor dog who'd spent three years hiding behind my legs at every stranger—he was stretched out on the kitchen floor like he owned the place, his long grey body forming a comma around Maks's bare ankles.
One of his ears twitched when I appeared in the doorway, but he didn't get up.
Didn't come to me. Just lifted his head, acknowledged my existence, and went back to watching the man at the stove with devoted, food-motivated intensity.
Traitor. Complete and utter traitor.
Maks turned at the sound of my footsteps. Something warm moved through his expression—relief, maybe, or tenderness. The corners of his mouth lifted in that small smile I was starting to recognize, the one that made his whole face softer.
"Good morning." His voice was quiet. Unhurried. "How are you feeling?"
A simple question.
A normal question. The kind of question adults asked each other every day, the kind of question I'd answered a thousand times without thinking. Fine. Tired. Okay. Any of the socially acceptable responses that served as conversational filler, placeholders for the more complicated truths underneath.
I opened my mouth to answer.
Nothing came out.
The words were there. I could feel them, somewhere in the back of my brain—concepts and meanings and the combination of sounds that would form a response. But the path between my brain and my mouth had collapsed. Caved in like a bridge that couldn't hold the weight anymore.
Too much.
That was the only thought I could hold. Too much.
Too much input, too many feelings, too many things that had happened in the last forty-eight hours that my brain hadn't finished processing yet.
The violence and the photograph and his hands and the sound of something being broken and "Good girl" and his thumb on my cheekbone and—
The light was too bright.
I hadn't noticed it before, but now it was all I could notice.
The grey morning light bleeding through those expensive windows, hitting the white countertops and reflecting back at me like an assault.
My eyes wanted to close. My body wanted to fold in on itself, wanted to retreat to somewhere dark and quiet and safe.
My skin felt too thin.
Every nerve ending was firing at once, registering things I didn't want to register. The texture of the hardwood beneath my feet. The brush of his sweater against my wrists. The smell of coffee and eggs and him, layered over each other in ways my brain couldn't separate.
I couldn't be a person right now.
Maks looked at me—right at me. Then, he set down the spatula.
The movement was slow, deliberate. No sudden sounds. No unexpected stimuli. Just the soft clink of metal against the stove rest, and then he was turning fully toward me, giving me his whole attention without moving any closer.
He knew. Somehow, he knew.
"It’s okay." His voice had gone soft. Lower than before, pitched to soothe rather than stimulate. "You don't have to talk."
He wasn't going to force me. Wasn't going to ask questions I couldn't answer, or push me to explain what was happening in my head, or look at me with that blend of confusion and disappointment that I'd learned to expect from people who didn't understand.
He just accepted it. Accepted me.
The paralysis didn't lift. The words didn't come back. But something in my chest loosened, just a fraction, and I found myself able to take a breath for the first time since I'd walked into the kitchen.
"Let me help you," he said quietly. "Can you nod for yes?"
I nodded.