Page 258 of Fractured Loyalties

It sounds like control to anyone else. To me, it sounds like the only version of freedom I can live inside.

“We’ll smooth that out later.” I say, “Right now, I want coffee and food and a list of names in that order.”

“Coffee,” he echoes, amused. “Food. Names.”

“Not necessarily in neat sequence,” I add, and he huffs a sound that lives halfway between a curse and a kiss.

We rise together. He strips the sheets and ties them in a knot for the laundry bag, like everything has to be contained before he lets the next hour in. I tug on clean cotton and a pair of leggings from the drawer he stocked while pretending he wasn’t planning to keep me. He pretends I didn’t notice.

In the kitchen, I start the machine while he wipes the counter with motions that read as regulation. Lydia leans against the far wall, scrolling, one boot hooked on the baseboard. She looks up long enough to smirk at the two mugs I set down.

“Partnership,” she says. “Who knew?”

“Don’t push it,” I tell her, and she grins, toothy and real, and returns to the feed.

Elias pours. He hands me a mug and brushes his knuckles over mine. The tiny, careless intimacy feels like a promise more binding than any knot he’s tied on me.

We drink standing there, shoulder to shoulder, and when he starts talking—routes, numbers, names—I listen and don’t look away. He doesn’t ration. He doesn’t pretty it up. He gives me all of it, and I take it.

When the plan is sketched and the coffee is gone, he turns to me again. His mouth curves, not a smile. Something heavier.

“Tomorrow,” he says.

“Today,” I correct, lifting on my toes to kiss the corner of his mouth. “We start today.”

He swallows that correction like a man who’s been starving for someone to hand him a line and hold him to it. He nods once.

We move. Together.

Epilogue – Elias

Months have teeth, but they dull when you stop counting. The city doesn’t feel like a place that holds time. It just replaces faces, burns down corners, rebuilds them with glass, and waits for the same sins to repeat.

But in this apartment—my apartment—the air feels different. Steadier.

Mara is at the counter, rolling sleeves up her forearms while she sorts files for the clinic. Her hair is pinned high, with the neat braid she prefers, a strand loose where I pulled it earlier, and she didn’t bother fixing it. She isn’t nervous about her mess showing anymore.

The window throws pale light across her face. For months, I watched her carry shadows like armor. Now she wears mine instead. And she doesn’t flinch.

She doesn’t know I’m watching yet. That’s how I prefer it. The way she chews the corner of her lip while reading. The way her hand hovers over a page, as if she’s rewriting something in her head before she moves on.

I never believed in peace. Still don’t. But I’ve carved out something sharper. A version of silence that doesn’t demand penance. And she’s the reason.

When I shift, she looks up, eyes cutting through the light. “You’re staring,” she says.

“Yes.”

“You're going to say why?”

“No.” I walk to her. “I don’t explain myself to you.”

Her mouth curves faintly—not a smile, but the echo of one. “And yet, you do.”

I stop close enough to cage her against the counter. My hand lifts to her throat, thumb resting where her pulse ticks. She leans into it, no hesitation, no fear.

That’s the difference months make.

Her pulse beats steady under my thumb, not racing, not afraid. The first time I touched her this way, she froze. Now she tilts her chin and offers me more of her throat, like she knows it belongs in my hand.