Liz

"You worried?" he deadpanned. "Miracles do happen."

Soap snorted loudly from across the armoury. Price sighed into his coffee.

Gaz simply shook his head. "Can you two go five bloody minutes?" he asked.

"No."

"She started it."

You pointed dramatically. "I absolutely did not!"

Ghost finally looked over. Behind the skull mask, those dark eyes carried that same infuriatingly blank expression. "You breathed."

"...You're actually unbelievable."

"You'll live."

"Oh, will I?"

"Unfortunately."

You threw a cleaning rag at him. He caught it without looking. Arsehole.

It became routine. If you walked into a room—

"You're late."

"I've been here three minutes longer than you."

"If you say so."

During training— "You call that aim?"

"You call that personality?"

Soap nearly dislocated something trying not to laugh.

In the mess hall— "You taking all the chips?"

"I am now."

"You've got the appetite of a horse."

"And you've got the bedside manner of a cactus."

Everyone assumed the two of you genuinely couldn't stand each other. Maybe you did. Maybe he did. Sometimes you weren't entirely sure anymore. Because beneath every insult... He somehow always ended up beside you during briefings. Always covered your blind spot during training. Always silently shoved spare ammunition into your vest if yours ran low. Never acknowledged it. Never looked at you afterwards. Just...Did it. Which somehow made him even more irritating.

The mission wasn't supposed to be difficult. Quick in. Grab intel. Get out. Instead... Everything went sideways. The warehouse had been compromised before the team even arrived. Bullets erupted from every direction. Radio chatter dissolved into shouting. Someone screamed. Explosions rattled the concrete floor. You got separated.

Ghost noticed first.

"Where is she?"

Static answered.

Price's voice crackled. "Last seen east corridor."

Ghost was already moving.

"Ghost—"

Too late. He'd disappeared.

You fought your way back alone. Every corridor looked identical. Your ears rang. Your rifle was nearly empty. Blood soaked through your sleeve where a round had torn across your upper arm. Another sharp piece of shrapnel had buried itself into your side when the grenade detonated nearby.

You could still move. Mostly. Just... Slowly.

By the time you staggered outside... The extraction helicopter had already landed.

Soap spotted you first. "Jesus Christ!"

You tried smiling. "I've looked better." Then your knees gave out.

You never actually hit the ground. Something caught you. Hard. Strong. Familiar.

"What the hell happened?" Ghost.

You blinked up at him. It took a second to process why his voice sounded... Wrong. Not irritated. Not sarcastic. Angry. Terrified.

You managed a weak grin. "Thought you said I'd live."

His grip tightened around you. "You don't joke."

"I literally always—"

"Don't." His voice cracked like a whip.

You froze. Soap did too. Even Price looked over. Because nobody... Nobody... Had ever heard Ghost sound like that.

Blood dripped steadily between Simon's gloved fingers. Far too much of it. His pulse thundered so loudly he barely heard the medic shouting. "Move!" He ignored them. His entire world had narrowed to the warmth soaking through his gloves. To your face, far paler than it should've been. To your eyes struggling to stay open. "You stay awake."

You gave a sleepy blink. "Bossy."

"I'm serious."

"You usually are."

He swallowed hard. "You stay with me."

"You still... hate me?"

The question barely left your lips. Soft. Half-conscious. Half-delirious. It hit him harder than any bullet ever had. His jaw clenched. "...Idiot."

"You do..."

He crouched beside you in the helicopter as the medic worked around him. One hand never leaving yours."I never hated you."

You frowned weakly. "You call me insufferable."

"You are."

"You said... I breathe wrong."

"You do."

"...You said unfortunately when people asked if I'd survive."

His eyes squeezed shut for the briefest moment. "...Yeah."

"So..."

His thumb brushed absent circles over the back of your hand. Gentle. Almost impossibly gentle. "So if you die..." His voice dropped into something rough enough to scrape against bone. "...I'll have no one left to argue with."

You smiled faintly. "That's... romantic."

"Shut up."

"There he is."

Relief punched straight through him so violently it almost hurt. There you were. Still mouthing off. Still impossible. Still alive.

Back at base, the medical wing became Simon's personal prison. He wasn't technically allowed inside while the doctors worked.

He ignored that.

Price tried once. "Riley."

"No."

"You'll only be in the way."

"I'm staying."

"There are medics—"

"I said I'm staying."

No one argued after that.

When you finally woke properly several hours later... The room was dim. Quiet. Someone sat beside your bed. Massive. Broad shoulders slumped. Forearms resting on his knees. Fast asleep. Ghost. His mask still on. One gloved hand wrapped loosely around yours, as though he'd fallen asleep making sure you couldn't disappear again.

You smiled. "...Didn't know you cared."

His eyes opened instantly. Combat reflexes. Always listening. "You shouldn't be awake."

"You sound disappointed."

"I'm not."

"You've got a funny way of showing it."

He leaned forward before he could stop himself. Checking your IV. Your bandages. Your breathing. Searching every inch of you for injuries he'd somehow missed. Only when he was satisfied did he finally meet your eyes. "You scared me."

The admission was so quiet you almost thought you'd imagined it. Simon Riley. The man who stared down death without blinking. Who walked into gunfire like rain. Who never let anyone see beneath that skull mask. Looked genuinely shaken. Because of you.

"I came back."

"Barely."

"I still came back."

His shoulders sagged. Then, before either of you could think too much about it... His forehead rested lightly against yours. Just for a second. A tiny gesture. Hidden from everyone else. "I can't..." he whispered.

"You can't what?"

"...Do that again."

You stared.

He pulled back slightly, eyes fixed somewhere over your shoulder. "I can handle bullets." Silence. "I can handle losing men." Another silence. "I know how." His voice faltered. "But if you ever come back looking like that again..." He exhaled shakily. "...I don't know what I'd do."

Your heart did something embarrassingly soft. "So..." You reached carefully for his hand. "...Does this mean we're friends?"

His eyes narrowed. "No."

"No?"

"We're still arguing."

A laugh escaped you despite the ache in your ribs. "There he is."

"There I am." He squeezed your hand once. Hidden beneath the blanket where no one else could see. "...But next time," he murmured, "you stay where I can see you."

You knelt, feeling around beneath the bed until your fingers closed around a cold sliver of metal. You pulled it free and let out a startled laugh.

In your grasp was a single silver tooth. 

You raised it to eye level, holding it closer than you'd ever held Ghost himself, save for your final awkward embrace. The metal caught the light as you turned it between your fingers, revealing the precision of its craftsmanship. It was curved on one end and straight along the other, with a tiny hole at the top where it must've once been fastened to his mask. 

You'd never checked whether he actually slept with that garish thing on. From your bedroll on the floor, you could never quite make out his face, but even if you had been able to, you knew he wouldn't have wanted you to look. Now that you were alone, it was painfully easy to recognize the truth: you'd accommodated his unusual habits since the day you'd met him, but somewhere along the way, you'd started doing it less out of propriety and more because you'd wanted him to like you.

You placed the silver tooth at the edge of your newly organized table, right beside a deep indent in the wood. That way, you'd be able to see it as you worked, and if you accidentally knocked it over, it wouldn’t immediately fall to the floor. The gesture was silly and more than a little pathetic, but you did it anyway. It'd help you remember.

***

The following week, you attended the festival alone. 

Due to this summer’s unusual heat, this year's harvest wasn't as bountiful as those in years past, but everyone would have enough to eat through the winter, and that was enough. The festivities were still lively, still bright. You enjoyed watching the people you'd known your entire life enjoy themselves. When you encountered the market girls, you bought each of them a piece of candy because it seemed like the amiable thing to do, but you didn't linger to catch their gossip or entertain any more prying questions than you already had.

The villagefolk were still curious about the knights. You smiled through it and kept your answers amiable, too. Yes, they'd left so suddenly. No, you didn't know where they'd gone, though surely it was somewhere important in service to the King. Yes, they'd all been so strong, and their horses had been so beautiful. Yes, the frightening one with the mask had stayed with you. No, you hadn’t seen his face or learned his name. No, you didn't know why he'd turned away all those girls’ offers, though given the tumultuous nature of his profession, perhaps it was for the best.

Things continued exactly as they always had. You delivered babies, tended to ailments, and sold remedies at the market once your garden yielded a sufficient harvest of its own. You rose before dawn, washed your laundry in the river, and ate your meals outside for as long as the weather allowed. Occasionally, when your mind was elsewhere or when you came home especially tired, you'd catch yourself cooking enough for two or reaching for an extra bowl, only to remember that you no longer needed to.

It was odd, realizing how lonely your life had become only after you'd been given a brief reprieve from it. First no mother, then no brother, and now no Ghost. But it hadn't hindered you before, and you wouldn't allow it to hinder you now. You still had your own life to live, whether or not there was anyone asking after you.

***

Autumn was as busy as you'd anticipated. You were proud of how diligently you'd prepared for the season's rise in illness, even if it was the same work you did every year. There was comfort in the rush and routine, in rising each morning with a clear list of tasks to accomplish. You were just beginning one of those mornings when a loud knock sounded at the door.

You bolted upright. For one irrational second, hope rose within you. Then you opened the door to a stranger and drifted back down to reality.

“Does the midwife live here?” the stranger asked. “The one who saved the knight’s life?”

You hesitated. The man was clean and well-dressed, clearly of higher station than you. You couldn't quite explain how you could tell, but something about his demeanor made it obvious he wasn't from your village. If he knew about Ghost, he had to be someone important, but the way he’d described your actions—saved the knight's life—was a flagrant exaggeration. You didn’t correct him, though; you weren’t inclined to explain Ghost's condition to someone you'd only just met.

He told you he was in the employ of a wealthy merchant farther north. The merchant's wife was nearing the end of her first pregnancy, and they wanted you to attend the delivery.

The journey took most of the day, carrying you through stretches of forest to a bustling town you'd never visited before. The merchant’s family lived in a grand house with more rooms than you could count. As always, you kept your attention on your duties, ignoring your own thoughts and the fineries around you until both mother and child had been declared healthy. Only when you were checking on the new mother one last time, tending to her as she rested in her luxurious bed, did you finally ask how she'd heard of you. 

"From the knight, of course," she said. Her voice was still hoarse from labor, but her body was relaxed, the tension smoothed from her brow.

“What was his name?” you asked. You gently tucked the blanket over her shoulders to disguise how eager you were to know. It was sewn from rich brown fur, the softest you'd ever felt.

“I don't recall,” she admitted, bashfully ducking her head. “But he was very good-looking.”

Gaz, then.

You thanked her and didn't pry any further. You wanted to, but it would've been ill-mannered to burden a woman who'd just given birth with questions of your own self-interest. Besides, you'd just been paid in full, which you took as a sign that you were meant to leave. You'd charged the same price you did every other woman, but the pouch her husband had pressed into your hands was unusually heavy. You weren't sure how to politely insist on less, or whether you were even supposed to.

When you returned home, you mulled over how it could've happened. Maybe Gaz had met the merchant's family while passing through and, after learning they were expecting, he told them about you, expecting nothing of it. Or maybe he'd mentioned you over drinks with Soap and Price, and a nosy barmaid had passed your name along until it reached the merchant’s ears. 

Whatever the explanation, it had been a pleasant experience, a welcome aberration from your usual routine. You'd seen somewhere new, and now you had another memory you could trace back to the knights. 

You were content to let the incident stand on its own, but a few weeks later, another wealthy family sent for you. Then it happened again, and again, and by the time winter arrived, you were busier than you'd ever been. You found yourself meeting women unlike any of the ones you knew back home, women with soft hands and unblemished skin, women who could afford fresh linens and multiple servants and a plethora of other comforts you hadn't previously known existed. 

Apparently, stories were spreading about you. People across the Kingdom called you a gifted healer, extolling your abilities as if they were something exceptional, something magical. You were certain you were no more skilled than any other trained midwife in the region, but stories weren't tangible things—you couldn't just grab them from the air and stamp them out. So you ignored the praise instead, channeling the spirit of the most impassive man you’d ever met, and carried on with your work. 

With each journey, your existence grew a little larger. You saw more of the forest, more of the river, more of the lives people built beyond your village. The differences weren't all that dramatic, but they were noticeable. People spoke differently, planted different crops, gave their children different names. Sometimes you wondered if you might ever be summoned all the way to the sea, if you might ever see that mapped line between water and land. Witness the edge of the world itself, nothing but water.

It seemed unlikely, but then again, so had all of this.

***

You were making more money than you’d ever seen in your entire life. Money that would've allowed you to buy land, if you could; money that would've allowed you to sustain a family, if you had one. You saved most of it, driven by the practicality your mother had instilled in you, but you were unsure what to do with the rest. You already had everything you needed, but now you had the privilege of being able to purchase things you wanted, too.

First, you hired a blacksmith to change the creaking hinges on your cottage door. Then you bought a new blanket to carry you through the rest of the winter, fur-trimmed and wonderfully warm. Next came new vials to replace the ones Ghost had broken, along with new dishes, though you were too sentimental to discard the chipped ones. When spring arrived, you visited the tailor and had new dresses made from softer, thinner fabric, then paid extra to have them embroidered and embellished with ribbon. Girlish, perhaps, but what was the harm in that?

It occurred to you, on a rare slow evening, that you could pay to write to Ghost. Before the doubt crept in, you combed your thoughts for what you could potentially tell him. You could thank him and his Guard, maybe, for the reputation they'd given you, for the endless opportunities that had followed. You could describe what it was like attending to wealthy families, remark on how ridiculous some of their expenditures seemed or provide a list of the most amusing baby names you’d come across. You could paint a picture of the land surrounding your cottage: heavy rainfall, freshly sown fields, trees beginning to flower along their spindly branches.

None of it seemed worthwhile. You could be earnest, but that wouldn’t make it any less inconsequential, any less trite.

And when you finally visited the scribe, another unsettling thought struck you: what if Ghost had already forgotten you? He’d only been with you for a handful of weeks, and since his departure, almost three full seasons had come and gone. He had asked you to write, but a soldier’s life surely moved at a far quicker pace than yours; his request might as well have been made an eternity ago. Was the brief stretch of summertime you’d spent together really worth an entire letter?

In the end, you chose to spend your money on your brother. You asked about his physician's training, about the differences between the forest and the coast, about the aunt and uncle who’d taken over your role as his guardian and protector but hopefully not his closest confidant. You wrote to him more often than you ever had before, sharing bits of your life in tandem with learning more about his own. You now had the means to be a greater part of it, even if it was from afar.

***

As it turned out, he didn’t forget.

Thankfully, the following summer was significantly less scorching than the one before. The spring rains had been kind to the land, nourishing the soil enough for you to plant a new row of raspberry canes, which would replace the old bushes—the ones your mother had painstakingly planted so many years ago—once they finally gave out. They wouldn’t bear fruit this year, but their baby leaves had begun to unfurl, sweet-scented and ridged beneath your fingertips.

That morning, you took your time watering them, mindful of their still-fragile roots. As you worked, a figure came walking up the path. A man, not a monster.

Ghost. 

He held the same impossible height, the same broad shoulders. No armor this time, though he still wore his mask and carried his sword. The blade hung sheathed at his hip, hidden from the sunlight. You set your bucket in the grass, dusted your hands on your skirt, and walked over to meet him, stopping just outside your cottage. 

He went still once you reached him. It was as if he'd stepped out of a dream, or perhaps you'd fallen into one. Your surroundings hadn't changed, yet Ghost's presence made everything feel distorted, unfamiliar. You folded your arms, your movements sticky-slow, your mind overwhelmed by a thousand questions at once. You wanted to ask him how he was here, why he was here, where his horse was, where his Guard was, whether he needed to ask for directions to find your cottage, whether he even remembered your name. 

What came out was: “Have you eaten breakfast yet?”

You regretted the words the instant they left your mouth. Ghost said nothing. He instead appraised you from head to toe, as if confirming that it really was you. A single year wasn't enough to change you all that much—not outwardly, at least. You were a little older, and your clothes were definitely nicer, but you weren't a child anymore, capable of growing by leaps and bounds with every passing season.

He stayed silent long enough for doubt to creep in. You wiped your brow as you waited, resisting the urge to smack your forehead. A year apart, followed by an unexpected reunion, and that was all you could think to say? Maybe if you’d run to him instead of walked, if you’d actually sent him a letter, no matter how frivolous its contents, he would've reacted differently. Taken you into his arms and swung you around, laughed with you and then carried you inside. But that wasn't who Ghost was, nor was it who you wanted him to be.

“Not yet,” he said at last. You shivered; if you’d been asleep, the gruff familiarity of his voice would’ve immediately woken you up. “Thought I’d surprise you.” 

“I am surprised,” you replied truthfully.

“Not actin’ like it.”

“My goodness,” you exclaimed, fluttering a hand to your chest. You took an exaggerated step forward, widening your eyes as if trying to drink in every aspect of him. He looked well, uninjured. In good spirits, too. "Am I dreaming? Sir Ghost, is that really you?" 

“That’s better,” he said.

His eyes crinkled—a smile. Your heart beat so fiercely you thought it might break free from your ribs. 

***

Initially, it took you absurdly little effort to fall back into physical routine with Ghost. Being around him felt like folding laundry or drawing water from the well, tasks you'd performed so many times that you could carry them out without conscious thought. You sat together in the grass and ate breakfast in silence. Afterwards, Ghost gathered the dishes while you finished watering your plants. Then he took your basket and you both set out towards the market, retracing the very path he'd taken up to your cottage.

The difficulty came with talking to him. Without any animosity to overcome or trust to establish, the conversation should've flowed more easily. You knew what his hands felt like, knew the solid weight of his armor-clad frame against yours. Yet as you walked beneath the swaying branches, shadows dappling the dirt, you couldn't decide whether to treat him like someone you'd just met or simply pick up where you'd left off the summer before.

“Everyone will be ecstatic to see you,” you decided to say, though perhaps they already were, if they'd caught a glimpse of him on his way into the village. You'd been sneaking your own glances at him, hoping to catch some hint of how he was behaving so you could mirror it, but it was akin to mimicking a rock. “I still get asked about you.”

"They’ve got nothing else to talk about?”

“I suppose not,” you said, then winced, because you didn't truly believe that. Even if they weren't doing anything as grand as directly serving the King, they still led their own unique lives, with their own ups and downs, joys and miseries, just as you did. “How's…where's your horse?”

“At the tavern,” he said.

So they had already seen him. You were the last to learn of his arrival, this time around. You rounded a bend, tall grass brushing against your skirt. Ghost slowed for a moment, and you matched his pace. Your body had remembered how to keep with his strides, too. 

“The boys still ask about you, too.”

You laughed before you could stop yourself, realizing he meant the rest of his Guard. It was odd to refer to three grown men as boys, though you supposed you also thought of your brother that way, despite the fact that he was a man now, too. He remained fixed in your memory exactly as you'd last seen him, frozen as a child no matter how much time passed. Ghost was supposed to be one of those fixed, frozen people too, but instead he was here. You were burning with curiosity to know why, but you preemptively squashed it down. He would've told you if he wanted to.

“What do you tell them?”

“That you're busy,” he said plainly. “Working hard.”

You were grinning, stupidly, before you could help it. Because you were busy, and you had been working hard. And unlike the praise you received from the wealthy families you met, Ghost wasn't the sort of man to flatter people for politeness' sake. If he said something, he meant it.

“Did you tell them to spread those stories about me?” you asked.

He looked at you from the corner of his eye, then sped up. “Maybe.”

***

The next evening, Ghost sat at your table while you presented all the purchases you'd made over the past year. You still had work to do, and he hadn't asked for a tour of your belongings, but you'd spent the entire day struggling to concentrate with him lingering so close by. You needed a distraction, something for the two of you to do besides sitting and looking at one another. 

First came the cottage door. You threw it open, revealing the setting sky, and swung it vigorously back and forth. The hinges remained blessedly silent.

“It doesn't creak anymore!”

Ghost nodded. You chose to interpret that as him being impressed. Next came your new dishes, which drew no reaction from him since he'd already eaten off them; then your new glass vials, which prompted a curt apology from him about your tumultuous first meeting; and finally your fur-lined winter blanket. 

"Feel how soft it is," you urged, cradling the folded blanket in your arms.

You'd spent the entire evening carefully keeping the table between the two of you. If you stepped closer, you weren't sure whether Ghost would object, or whether you wanted him to. Even this quiet guessing game felt familiar, but you weren’t sure you wanted that, either.

He leaned over and brushed his fingertips over the trim.

“It's soft,” he agreed.

“Isn't it?” you said brightly. “If you'd come during the winter, I'd have let you use it.”

Ghost sat back in his chair and folded his burly arms across his chest. "Then how would you stay warm?"

“I'd have bought another,” you answered, instead of blurting out something dangerous, like we could've shared it.

You returned the blanket to the chest at the foot of your bed and fastened the latches. That concluded the tour, you supposed. You could've shown him your new dresses—the ribbons, the embroidery—but he could already see them, because you were wearing one. You were sure he'd noticed the changes, but he hadn't mentioned them, which you were grateful for. That felt too exposing somehow, admitting you liked nice things, even when they were impractical. 

“And what's this?”

You turned. Pinched between Ghost's fingers was a glint of silver, plucked right out of the groove in the table, resembling some strange ingredient. You could've ground it up in your mortar, mixed it into a shimmering remedy to cure some fantastical ailment, or blown it into the wind to make a wish. 

“It's a tooth,” you said, baring your own smile at him for reference. “I believe it fell from your mask.”

“Why'd you keep it?”

Slowly, you crossed the room until you stood beside him, feeling both very foolish and very brave. After all that effort to occupy yourself, you'd ended up doing the very thing you'd been trying to avoid: looking at him while he looked at you. But in this moment, with you on your feet and him seated, watching you so intently, it didn't feel as daunting.

“The time you spent here—” you began, searching for the words, “it didn’t feel real. I wanted something to remember you by.”

He shifted in his chair and held out the tooth, like it was now his turn to show things off to you. It looked tiny in his fingers, the size of a seed. What did his real teeth look like? Would you ever see them? You stuck your hand out and he dropped it into your waiting palm. All you needed now was some soil and sun.

“Was plenty real to me,” he said.

You closed your fingers around the metal, gripping it so tightly that its edges dug into your skin. “So you remembered me?”

“Couldn't forget.” Then he was grasping your wrist, tugging you closer, dropping away just as you'd begun to process the sensation. His palms felt slightly softer than you remembered, but maybe you were just imagining things. You were standing between his knees now, his thighs brushing against your own legs. “Never met a bird like you before.”

“You don't have to be so crude,” you complained. It was easier than acknowledging this sudden proximity. Perhaps he wanted to pick up where you'd left off a year ago, but where was there to go after this? To the blanket? "There are plenty of more favorable ways to describe a woman."

He said your name, and out came his raspy laugh. You wanted to congratulate yourself—it'd taken you so long to break that out of him a year earlier, and now you'd gotten it on the very second day. Tentatively, you reached out with your other hand, waiting for resistance and finding none. Ghost’s brown eyes remained trained on you, barely blinking. You pressed your fingertips against his mask, right over his teeth. He took a sharp breath, and when he exhaled, the warmth filtered through the cloth and washed over your skin, spreading through you until every bit of your body felt fuzzy and molten.

Even more foolishly, even more bravely, you traced your fingers over the row of silver sewn into the mask. You could make out the faint curve of his lip beneath them, belonging to a face you’d once seen half of and subsequently convinced yourself you hadn’t. Each touch felt like pouring water onto thirsty ground. Only when you reached the end did you realize your breathing had become as uneven as his.

“I'm sorry,” you whispered, withdrawing your hand.

“Don't be.”

His voice was so low, so quiet, that for one fleeting moment you almost wished for a great gust of wind to come, to rattle your door hard enough for the silent hinges to squeak again, if only to break whatever spell had settled over the room. Everything was happening all out of order, too quickly for you to make any sense of it. You placed the silver tooth back on the table and stepped away. Ghost picked it up again, turning it thoughtfully between his fingers. You sat across from him, reached for your pestle, and resumed your work.

***

You didn't attempt to touch Ghost again after that. He didn't attempt to touch you again, either. If things had shifted at all between you and him, they'd only moved backwards. As the week unfolded, you slipped back into the rhythm you'd built the previous summer, living alongside one another and bickering whenever the opportunity presented itself. There were no visitors this time, no knights or unmarried girls, no secret expeditions into the forest. You worried, at first, that Ghost might grow bored of living the same routine day after day, but he seemed perfectly content to carry out his old chores and keep you company whenever your work demanded your full attention.

Halfway through the second week, you were summoned for a delivery. Only one village over this time, a place you'd been offering your services to long before you'd met Ghost. You hurried around the cottage, gathering your supplies. You hadn't been told of the mother's condition, so you packed with extra care, double-checking everything, preparing for every potential problem that could arise.

To your surprise, Ghost, who'd been ambling around the garden, came inside to help. Before you could reach for your basket, he'd already picked it up. He pulled the chairs out of your path and reached for the very things you would've taken yourself—herbs, salves, honey—lifting them from the shelves without you having to ask. How much had he remembered?

"You know me so well, but I know so little about you," you said as you dropped your scissors into the basket he was holding open for you. Your blood was already racing in anticipation of the birth, and now it seemed to be carrying your tongue along with it. "It isn't fair."

"It isn't," he echoed, holding the door open as you stepped outside together. "Does it bother you?"

Had you not been preoccupied with leaving, you might've stopped dead in your tracks. This, at least, was different. Ghost was asking what you thought, what you felt, all so openly. He never would've done that the year before. Or perhaps he would've, if he'd stayed for longer.

"Of course it does," you said. You wanted to explain more—that it bothered you because you wanted to know him, that the longer you spent tiptoeing around what his reappearance meant, the more curious you became, that it felt ridiculous to care for a man whose real name you didn't even know—but you didn't have enough time. "But you're free to live however you'd like. I'll be back late."

You didn't allow yourself to mull over what he'd said until your work was complete. On your journey home, you considered how you didn't know any of the conventional things about Ghost: where he'd grown up, what his family was like, or what kind of boy he'd once been. But you knew his Guard, knew how hard he worked. You didn't know what lay beneath the mask, but you knew how he carried himself, how he moved through the world. Maybe you didn't know him in the traditional sense, but you still understood the man he was, how he regarded you, and that was good enough.

***

You returned home at an awkward hour, still buzzing with energy. It was too early to sleep, but too late to start on anything productive. Ghost was sitting outside in the patch of grass by the hearth. As you approached, you felt the urge to ask him what he was thinking, wondering if he was expecting you to apologize for the earlier words you'd spoken. He rose before you could greet him and studied you carefully, then took your things from your hands.

"Are you going to rest?" he asked.

"Not yet," you said, relieved by the lack of agitation in his tone. You followed him to the cottage, leaning against the doorway as Ghost set your baskets down where you usually kept them. When he turned to exit, you sidestepped him just in time to avoid his chest bumping into yours. "Where are you going?"

"Need to check on my horse," he said brusquely.

"I'll come with you," you said, a little too eagerly, before finally finding the sense to rein yourself in. "If that's alright with you."

Ghost had already set off. "Come on, then."

You remained behind him long enough to breathe a sigh of relief, then rushed to catch up.

The earthy smells of hay and leather greeted you as you stepped inside the tavern's guest stable. A stable boy led you down the row of stalls, all the way to the end. Raspberry the stallion nickered as Ghost drew near, docile behind the wooden gate yet still so imposing. He looked exactly as you remembered: reddish-brown coat, star-speckles of white on his forehead, and a long, glossy mane. You stayed back cautiously, until Ghost waved you over, making room for you to stand beside him.

"Hello, Raspberry," you murmured. Despite his tremendous size, you couldn't help speaking to him as if he were a child, young and innocent. You lightly patted his side. His limber neck ducked down, then up again. "You're even more handsome than I remembered."

While you stroked his coat, Ghost busied himself with tasks of his own. With the assistance of the stable boy, he poured fresh grain into the trough, checked the water bucket, and rubbed his horse's forehead, muttering something too low for you to hear.

Maybe this was how he felt when he watched you work. You liked watching Ghost like this, too. He moved with the same brisk, unassuming competence he brought to everything else, tending to his horse with practiced hands. It wasn't difficult to picture the two of them crossing the kingdom together, mane and cloak streaming behind them, armor and leather gleaming in the light. You tried, for just a moment, to imagine yourself riding behind them, beside them. The thought tied your stomach into knots.

"If I'm able to save enough money," you said, "I'd like to get a horse of my own."

Ghost humored you. "What kind?"

You considered it, mentally shuffling through all the different horses you'd seen. You still didn't know too much about them, but you were certain you had no business with a stallion as magnificent as this one. It was hard to believe such a large, beautiful creature could exist, that he was real and walked among you. Raspberry was so enormous that even Ghost's broad hand covered only a fraction of his forehead. The white speckles peeking between his fingers looked like stars between clouds.

"Not one like yours," you decided. "I'd want a horse that's gentle. And perhaps old."

"It'd be useless." He stated this resolutely, like he was sharing an objective truth. "Wouldn't carry you far."

"But I'd enjoy its company. Wouldn't that be useful enough?"

He fell quiet, as if genuinely considering the question. You supposed most of the people closest to him had first been men he'd been assigned to fight beside, comrades bound together by duty before affection or the simple desire to be around each other. Perhaps companionship without utility—or the utility of companionship—wasn't something he'd ever had reason to think about. You supposed you hadn't, either, not for a long time. Not until he'd stumbled into your life.

"Dunno," he said at last.

"I'm unmarried and without children," you mused. That made him look at you sharply, his hands stilling against Raspberry's neck. "Most people would call me useless, too."

Silence, again. Raspberry nosed eagerly toward his trough, more interested in his supper than your conversation. You stepped back to give him room; you knew that much about horses, at least. Ghost gave his stallion one last reassuring pat, pressed a few coins into the stable boy's palm, and led the way back down the row and out into the village square. You diligently fell into step with him, brushing bits of hay from your skirt. The market had thinned with the evening, but the handful of people still wandering between the stalls immediately noticed him. You would too, if the roles were reversed.

"I enjoy your company," Ghost said, before you'd even made it back to the path. You copied one of his own mannerisms, offering him a jerky nod of your own, rather than asking him where all of these sudden niceties had come from.

***

As you walked home for the second time that day, Ghost told you he'd be leaving again soon. Fatigue was settling into your bones, the exhaustion of the whirlwind day finally catching up with you. The sky had darkened completely, stars scattered overhead like the white speckles across his stallion's forehead. This had to be one of the nicest parts of having him around, you thought—having someone to walk home with after dark.

"Last year was busy," he began. You instantly quieted your breathing, wishing the evening insects chittering in the trees would hush with you, lest they distract him and make him retreat once more. "But I get leave every few months. Can go wherever I please."

"And you chose to return here." You hoped you sounded calm, encouraging—whatever he needed to feel comfortable with telling you more. Even if he didn't, you already understood what he was implying, and the fact that he'd offered it of his own accord was enough.

"I did."

Why, why, why, you wanted to ask, but didn't. You waited instead. So many things had yet to fall into place, and this would've been a piece too large to comprehend all at once. He hadn't told you when he'd arrive, and you already suspected he wouldn't tell you when he'd leave, either. You still had your own life to live, your own work to do. But you could picture Ghost woven into your life, not the way he had been last summer, but in a week and a half or a handful of days or whatever he could spare every few months. It wasn't the most vivid romance—if it could be labeled a romance at all—not the kind the market girls would've dreamed of, but it sounded quite lovely to you all the same.

You continued picturing it, calm mornings and focused evenings and all the silly things you did in between, as you unlatched your cottage door and laid out your bedroll. You wanted to voice at least some of it out loud, but you decided to save it for the morning, when your mind was steadier. Meanwhile, Ghost prepared for sleep alongside you. You could tell, when his footfalls stopped, that he'd finished and was now sitting at the edge of the bed. 

You looked his way to confirm it, and of course, he was already looking at you. His sword was in its regular place against the wall by the pillow, as if he might need to ward off any opponents in his sleep.

"Will you sit with me?" he asked.

Maybe he'd been waiting, too. You crossed the distance and sat beside him, keeping space between your thigh and his. A year ago, he’d taken your hand here, seated at the edge of your bed while you stood before him. Now you were level with him, so you decided to be bold and take his in return. You interlaced your fingers together and let him guide your joined hands into his lap, where they came to rest atop his thigh. The feeling of him sent little sparks of something—anticipation, maybe, or disbelief that this was even happening—coursing up your arm, coalescing into a bundle of warmth in your chest.

Feeling bolder still, you leaned over and attempted to rest your head against his shoulder. Ghost gave you the small kindness of looking away while you tried, but reality wasn't always as quaint as the stories. He was too tall, his posture too rigid, for the angle to be comfortable. After a few fumbling moments, you withdrew and sat upright again. 

“D’you want to lay down?” he asked. 

Your face burned. “Perhaps.”

Then Ghost took his hand out of yours to place it on your shoulder, gently guiding you back onto the bed. You caught hold of his biceps in return, wanting to pull him down with you. You weren't sure what you were doing anymore—it felt like your body was behaving independently of your brain, like all the excitement had crowded out your rational thought.

"We can't both fit," he warned.

You patted his arms, ignoring how firm they were to the touch. “Can we try, at least?”

A great shuffling of limbs ensued, almost like play-fighting. You laid down on your back and Ghost came to hover atop you. Then you both registered how preposterously large he was and quickly traded places, putting him on his back while you hovered over him instead. Your legs tangled with his, then he was creeping his way against the wall, until his shoulder was practically jammed into it. You wedged yourself onto the remaining sliver of mattress until you were half lying atop him and half supported by the bed. You wanted to laugh, but then one of his hands came to rest in the middle of your back, the other hesitantly perched on your shoulder. You lightly placed your own hands on his chest in return.

There was so much touching, so much contact, so much Ghost. You could hear each inhale he took, see the shine of his eyelids when he blinked. He smelled like the same soap you used. You'd never laid with a man like this before, so intimately entwined, and that realization sent gooseflesh rising along your arms, legs, the back of your neck, and everywhere else. You shivered despite yourself, fighting the urge to squirm.

"Are you cold?"

"No," you said, and fought back another shiver. You poked him in the chest, right over his heart. "This is just very—intense."

"Intense," he repeated.

"Unmarried people aren't supposed to behave like this, you know."

Ghost barked out an incredulous laugh. You felt it vibrate in your own chest. "Aren't you a midwife? Unmarried people behave like this all the time."

"Sir Ghost," you said, fully intending to match him with something equally crass. But then his lashes fluttered, and the thought vanished at once. What you really wanted was to make him acknowledge all of this, to call attention to everything he'd been doing to you since he arrived. "Why did you come to see me again?" 

"I wanted to."

"What… what else do you want?" you pressed.

He shifted the hand on your back, drawing it further up until it was between your shoulder blades. The weight felt nice, until you realized he was using the movement to stall. You withdrew one of your own legs that had been bunched against his, like a little separation might help him think better. Miraculously, it seemed to work.

"I want to see you, when I can." He spoke so stiffly that you might've thought you were forcing the words out of him, but you already knew that wasn't possible. You averted your gaze. "I want to look after the land with you. I want to take you to the sea. I had a younger brother, too. If I could see him again—"

He cut himself off. Each sentence he uttered had pierced straight through you, so sincere that it hurt. And beneath all that sincerity was something so awful, so unbearably sad that it left you reeling. You'd suspected some form of strife in his past, pieced it together from all the sparse details you'd gleaned over time, but you hadn't anticipated anything like this. You missed your brother so much it ached, but at least you could still hope to see him again. Ghost had carried that same ache with no hope at all, but now he was here, giving you a chance to turn your own hope into something real. What use was knowing his name or his face when he was offering you something like this?

"I'm sorry," you said weakly.

He shook his head. "It was a long time ago."

You shook your head harder, jostling you both until your forehead bumped lightly against the cloth covering his own. "That doesn't mean anything. I wish I could see my mother again, too. I miss her all the time.”

He was quiet for a long while. His eyes were open and focused on you, but it didn’t seem like he was entirely there. You remained alert anyway, every trace of weariness from the day pushed aside to allow this to take precedence. 

"Did you miss me?" he asked.

"Yes," you said quickly, unabashedly. His eyes finally closed. You wanted to cup his face, to slip a thumb beneath his mask to feel his pulse at his neck, but that was too drastic of an action for a moment as tremulous as this, so you curled a hand into his shirt instead. Over his heart again. "You can see me whenever you'd like. And you can help me with the land, and—and would you really take me to the sea?"

You didn't know how to explain the weight of what you were asking, how to tell him that he was cradling your own heart in his two massive hands. Given the way he was looking at you, he likely understood it well enough on his own.

"I would," he said, and later on, he did.

***

Masterlist!

He reaches out his hands — those hands that have broken necks and fired thousands of weapons—and buries them in your hair. You feel the thick callouses of his palms brushing against your scalp. Sometimes, he pulls a little too hard by accident because his fingers are too large and clumsy for such silky, fragrant strands. But the way he breathes heavily over you, concentrated on not hurting you, is the most emotional thing in the world.

He doesn't stroke you with his fingertips; he caresses you with his entire palm, moving his hand in a rhythmic, heavy way.

He rubs his large hands over your back, moving up and down with firm pressure. It’s not a softness touch; He is "cute" because, even though it feels like he’s pinning you down, he is actually offering himself as your safe harbor.

Simon Riley is the kind of man who would punch you if you were an enemy, but who spends twenty minutes trying to untangle a knot in your hair with hands trembling for fear of making you say "ow." He isn't smooth; he is solid. And in his world, solidity is the greatest proof of love there is.

You don’t turn around, but you can feel his stare digging into your spine. “Dangerous way to start a sentence.”

Soap ignores you. “Ye disappeared Thursday night.”

Gaz hums thoughtfully, then chimes in. “Yeah. She did disappear.”

You lift the mug and take a slow, deliberate sip, then begrudgingly turn to face them. “People are allowed to leave rooms, Johnny.”

“Aye,” Soap says, leaning forward now, elbows braced on his knees. “But ye didnae leave just the room. Ye left the party.”

Price looks up, now, interest sparking as he peers at you over the rim of his mug. “Did she?”

“Oh, she did,” Gaz says with a little too much enthusiasm. “One minute she was arguing with Soap about whether die hard is a Christmas movie—”

“It is,” Soap cuts in.

“—and the next,” Gaz continues, “she’s gone. Took her coat and everything. I finished her drinks.”

Your gaze flicks between them but you school your expression carefully, even as warmth creeps up your neck, settles hot and undeniable behind your knees. It’s hard to keep secrets from men who’re built to break them apart, tenfold when the dissection is taking place in unison.

Being the object of their ire is not something you’d expected when waking up this morning.

“Wow,” you say lightly. “You lot ever consider careers in surveillance?”

Soap’s mouth curls into a grin - you already knew he’d dismiss that.

“So. Who was it?”

You choke, just a little, on your coffee. “Who was what?”

His grin sharpens. “Donnae play dumb.”

Price studies you now. He’s standing a mere arms length away so it isn’t hard to notice the way his eyes track up and down the length of you, the kind of look that sees more than it should.

God help you. Of course your Captain has to be involved in this.

“Mm.” Price quips, taking a sip of tea. “You aren’t exactly subtle, Sarg.”

You still. “I’m not?”

“No,” Gaz says, squinting up to the ceiling as if recalling the last few days. “You’ve been…glowy.”

“Kyle.” You stare at him. “That’s not a real word.”

“It absolutely is,” Gaz says, unbothered. “Next morning you were smiling. During breakfast.”

You huff. “I smile all the time.”

Soap snorts. “No, ye don’t.”

You shoot him a look. “Excuse me?”

“Ye smile politely,” he corrects. “Customer-service smile. This was different.”

“Johnny.” You pause, slowly lower the mug. “What does that even mean?”

Soap rocks back in his chair, eyes alight with vindication. “It means you had that look. The one that says you know something we don’t.”

“And you’re much more patient.” Price hums thoughtfully. “Less attitude too.”

“Okay.” You grimace. “This is wildly invasive for a Sunday morning.”

“And yet,” Gaz nods with a shrug, “accurate.”

You glance, briefly, instinctively, across the room.

Simon hasn’t moved.

He’s still on the couch, one boot hooked over the other, coffee cradled loosely in his hand. His hood shadows his eyes and the mask hides everything else yet he looks exactly like he always does; detached, only half-present, like this conversation is happening three rooms away.

Which is why it doesn’t register as suspicious.

Soap shakes his finger at you. “Ye left with someone. And since I personally struck out with the blonde from logistics—”

“You were never in the running, mate.” Gaz mutters.

“—we’re tryin’ tae work out who beat me tae it.”

The room falls silent, after that.

You stare at him for a long second, which you’re sure isn’t helping the situation at all- then let out a short, incredulous laugh. “That’s…really where we’re going with this?”

Soap shrugs, unapologetic. “It’s a valid question.”

Gaz snorts into his mug. “It’s haunting him.”

“It’s not haunting me,” Soap says immediately, then scowls when both you and Gaz look at him. “Alrigh’ fine. It’s a bit haunting me.”

You drag a hand down your face, and try to turn away toward the door in hopes he’ll just drop it. “This is ridiculous.”

He doesn’t.

“Is it?” Soap asks. He’s fully upright now, elbows on his knees again, all sharp attention. “Because from where I’m sittin’, ye vanished mid-argument, came back the next mornin’ looken like you’d slept better than ye have in weeks, and now you’re actin’ like this is none of our business.”

“It is none of your business.”

“That’s never stopped us before,” Gaz points out.

Price’s gaze stays on you, thoughtful, quiet. He doesn’t pile on. Doesn’t need to. He’s always been the one who waits, lets people talk themselves into corners.

“You weren’t sneaky about it,” he says instead. “That’s what’s got them stuck.”

Your pulse gives a small, traitorous jump. You think he knows. If anyone would know, it’d be him.

Soap snaps his fingers. “Exactly. Ye didn’t look guilty. Ye looked…comfortable.”

Heat intensifies on the back on your knees again. It crawls up your back and reaches for your neck, where the Ghost of Ghost’s fingers are still dancing. He’s getting close.

“You’re reaching.” You manage.

“Maybe,” Soap says. “But humour me.”

He starts ticking names off on his fingers—

“Not Gaz.”

“Tragically,” Gaz says, lifting his mug in salute.

“Not Price.”

Price snorts. “I’d remember.”

“And not me,” Soap finishes, nodding decisively to himself.

You don’t bother hiding the look you give him. “How devastating.”

“So that leaves…” he trails off, eyes sweeping the room.

You feel it then—the stillness.

Simon hasn’t moved. Not since this started. Same posture. Same loose grip on his coffee. Same unreadable calm, like he’s carved from the furniture instead of sitting on it. You can feel your awareness tug toward him, but you force yourself not to stare.

Professional to the bone.

“Could’ve been someone outside the team,” Gaz offers, tilting his head.

Soap shakes his head immediately. “Nah. She wouldn’t risk that.”

You lift a brow. “You say that like you know me.”

“I do,” Soap says. “That’s the whole problem, lass.”

Gaz cuts in again. “Whoever it was, you trusted them.”

Your breath catches for half a second. You take another sip of coffee you don’t need.

Soap’s eyes light up. “See? That. That pause right there.”

You glare at him. “I paused because you’re annoying.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Someone you’ve worked with a while,” Gaz adds, nodding like the theory is solidifying.

Your eyes flick to Simon again, who remains silent.

Which is, infuriatingly, normal. He never chimes in on this kind of thing. Never speculates. Half the time he looks like he’s not listening at all—like his mind’s already somewhere else entirely. So no one notices that he hasn’t shifted, hasn’t reacted, hasn’t given them a single thing to latch onto.

Soap squints at you harder. “Was it someone senior?”

You wrinkle your nose. “Ew.”

“Junior?”

“Absolutely not.”

Gaz tilts his head, studying you again. “Then who?”

You shrug, aiming for careless. “Maybe it was a ghost.”

The room groans in unison.

“Don’t,” Soap says.

“That was painful,” Gaz adds.

Price rubs at his temple. “Christ.”

Across the room, Simon exhales—slow, controlled—through his nose. It’s barely audible. Barely there. But you hear it anyway. You always do.

Soap throws his hands up. “This is doen’ my head in.”

You straighten, setting your now-empty mug down with a soft clink. “Maybe you should all focus on your own lives.”

Soap watches you, suspicion etched into every line of his face. “One day we’re gonna’ figure ye out.”

You smile over your shoulder as you turn toward the door. “I look forward to it.”

On your way out, you pass the couch. Simon doesn’t look at you. Doesn’t move. Doesn’t say a word until you’re just past him; close enough that your leg nearly brushes his knee—and then he whispers, lowly grumble meant only for you.

“Shoulda stayed quiet.”

Your step falters for half a heartbeat until you collect yourself and keep walking.

Behind you, Soap’s already winding himself up again. “I’m tellen’ ye, it’s someone we’re not even considerin’—”

You don’t turn around.

“They aren’t nearly as intimidating in the stories,” you said, once you were along the path back home. As lovely as Soap’s horse had been, you preferred walking to riding—you felt more comfortable when you had steady ground beneath your feet. 

“They’re soldiers,” Ghost replied, which was more than fair. 

In the stories, soldiers rarely seemed burdened by the uglier realities of their work. The violence existed only to heighten the romance of it all—a roughened man showing tenderness only for the girl he loved, the lucky girl blooming under his adoration like a flower in the sun. She’d become special, cherished, noteworthy, all the things her ordinary village life could never afford her.

You understood the appeal well enough, but you couldn’t conjure up a way to explain that without speaking cruelly of the market girls. Despite their immaturity, you didn’t actually harbor any judgement toward their fantasies. You might’ve turned out exactly like them, had you been born to a different woman. So you borrowed one of Ghost’s favorite conversation tactics and kept quiet instead.

You continued along the path together, sticking to the shaded side. This summer would be remembered for years to come, you thought, for how remarkably, excruciatingly hot it had been.

“Why’d you play stupid in there?” Ghost suddenly asked.

You faltered. “When did I do that?”

“The map,” he said impatiently. 

“I wasn’t playing stupid,” you protested, fighting the embarrassment twisting up in your stomach. “Us commonfolk aren’t as well-educated in geography as you are.”

Ghost remained skeptical. “You’re hiding something, girl.”

On the contrary, you weren’t hiding enough. There was hardly an aspect of your life he hadn’t already seen. Ghost knew what you looked like when you were happy or pensive or half-asleep; what your brother wrote to you about and where you stored his letters; how you sweated over the hearth while cooking and how you organized your shelves; the way you hunched over your worktable whenever you needed to concentrate. 

“You’re the secretive one,” you shot back, because it was easier to argue than process the fact that he currently knew you more intimately than your own living family did. “Ghost isn’t even your real name.”

“Did you think it was?”

Before you could respond, a rabbit darted across the path and disappeared into the underbrush. You listened to the rustle of leaves until the sound faded away, wishing you could’ve escaped with it. 

“Let’s not talk about it,” you said weakly.

To your relief, he didn’t push you any further. You completed the rest of your walk in silence, but as your cottage slowly came into view, you couldn’t help but feel even more horribly out of your depth. This was all your existence amounted to: your home, your garden, your work. You didn’t know enough to even recognize what you didn’t know. How much of Ghost’s life remained hidden simply because you lacked the imagination to ask about it? And if you did know the right questions, would he actually be willing to answer them? 

While Price might’ve considered your ignorance to be a favorable trait, you didn’t share the sentiment in the slightest. What you liked was being knowledgeable, being aware. You liked learning from your mother’s words, from your brother’s writings, from the women whose homes you visited for deliveries and illnesses. You liked knowing how people lived, how they differed from one another, how you could help ease their ailments. But your mother was gone, your brother was by the sea, and there were definite limits to what you could learn on your own. 

Ghost slowed near the edge of the property, gazing out over your land that wasn’t technically yours.

“I can stay with them at the tavern,” he said, shifting his weight onto his back foot. You doubted he possessed a single bone of uncertainty in his entire body, but this had to be the closest he’d ever come to it. “Or…” 

Your spiraling was halted by the abrupt realization that with the arrival of his Guard, Ghost would also be leaving soon. His impending departure should’ve been a cause for celebration—you’d regain your privacy, the gossiping would cease, and you wouldn’t be stuck quarreling with an infuriating man every other conversation. But in light of everything you’d seen and learned today, none of that seemed to matter. 

Even if they were merely the men he worked alongside, Ghost still had people to return to, places to go beyond this village and its corresponding stretch of forest and river. Meanwhile, you would remain tethered to the same life as all the women before you. Were you really that different from all the wistful girls you knew, dreaming up stories to keep themselves distracted from their reality? Were they jealous of you, or were they jealous of the knight?

“I don’t mind if you stay here.” You spoke tersely, fearful that if you ran your mouth for too long, you might accidentally spill every terrible thought rattling around inside your head. 

Ghost nodded once, promptly settling the matter.

***

When you went to the market a few days later, you were accompanied by both Ghost and Gaz. When you asked about Soap and Price, neither of them said anything, but you were familiar enough with their endless song-and-dance of secrecy to not press the matter. 

You hadn’t been anticipating them joining you, but it wasn’t all that terrible. Their company kept you from wallowing alone in your thoughts, and Gaz was friendly enough that speaking to him didn’t require a thousand exhausting layers of formality. Still, walking around in public between him and Ghost still had you feeling like a sheep flanked by two wolves, but even that comparison didn’t seem drastic enough. If they were creatures of the land, then you belonged to the river; if they belonged to the river, you were merely an insect skimming above the surface.

With the harvest festival approaching, the village was livelier than usual. New seasonal stalls crowded the market square, and unfamiliar faces milled around the locals. The market girls stood in their usual huddle, chatting amongst themselves. You noticed them noticing you, but you resolved only to approach if you actually had something—or someone—to offer. 

“Do you have any interest in marriage?” you asked Gaz, once the three of you were tucked away inside the baker’s shop.

Gaz gave you an easy smile, entirely unphased by the question. “Not yet, I’m afraid. I’ve got to earn more first.”

“Don’t let her start,” Ghost warned him, as though you were moments away from launching into an elaborate spiel on the intricacies of courtship and wooing maidens. “They won’t leave you alone if you do.”

You selected a loaf of bread and deposited it into your basket, which Ghost had insisted on carrying before you’d even left the cottage. “I never told anyone to approach you, Sir Ghost. The girls did that entirely on their own.”

Gaz’s mouth fell open in disbelief. “Ghost was getting approached?”

“Before they became acquainted with his personality, yes.”

Both you and Gaz dissolved into laughter, loud enough to earn a wary glance from the shopkeeper. Ghost grumbled something under his breath about the pair of you being idiots, but you caught his eye for a brief moment, blinking just after he did. His eyelashes were nonsensically pale, you thought distractedly, far too delicate of a feature for someone built like him.

“They’re too young,” Ghost said, directed more toward Gaz than you. “Better for you than me.”

That was new. You were still adjusting to the idea that Ghost had people in his life he could behave comfortably around, but this threw you off for an entirely different reason. He’d never spoken about the girls like this before, had barely volunteered an opinion that revealed anything about how he viewed courtship or marriage or romance at all, assuming he even allowed himself to entertain such notions in the first place. It was a painfully basic standard of decency, really, but it was nice to know that he had a sense of morals regarding these matters.

“How many were there?” Gaz asked, as uncautious as ever. He was squinting between you both, seemingly just as intrigued by the revelation. You looked down at yourself in case he’d spotted some glaring flaw in your appearance before you had, inspecting your skirt for any stray dirt or leaves caught in the fabric.

Ghost remained silent, apparently unwilling to reminisce.

“He was quite popular,” you replied in his stead, to which Gaz snorted.

Upon finding nothing wrong with your clothes, you motioned for Ghost to hand over the basket so you could retrieve your coin purse. To your confusion, he ignored you completely. Gaz paid for the bread instead, and when you demanded to know whether they’d arranged this beforehand, Ghost began squinting as well, almost as if he were smiling beneath the mask. 

***

Ghost’s presence began to lessen in frequency as he spent more and more time occupied with the Guard. With or without company, you kept yourself as busy as possible—you delivered another baby two villages over, tended to a family stricken with fever, and cooked meals for two just in case he happened to return in time to join you. On the evenings you ate alone, you sat outside and distracted yourself with games you used to play with your brother: counting how many different wildflowers you could spot in the grass, how many different insects you could hear in the trees, how many different animal-shaped clouds you could spot in the sky. 

It wasn’t particularly enjoyable, but it was fine. You’d lived like this for years. Once Ghost was permanently gone and enough time had passed, you’d settle back into routine.

Four solitary evenings came and went. On the fifth, you abandoned the games and wandered over to the garden after dinner. You laid down without much consideration for how you might look, near the bushes your mother had planted while she was still alive. The wildgrass itched against your skin, but the sensation felt more grounding than it did unpleasant. You closed your eyes and breathed in the scent of fresh dirt, lulling yourself into some semblance of calm. 

You weren’t sure how much time had passed—it could’ve been minutes or hours—when a rough voice broke you from your reverie.

“What are you doing?”

“Enjoying the weather,” you replied, without bothering to open your eyes.

When you finally did, you predictably found Ghost looming above, staring down at you as if you’d lost your mind. Still, he extended a hand toward you, stooping over so it’d be within your reach. As he hauled you upright, an unsteady mix of nervousness and elation coursed through your veins, near-overwhelming in its headiness until you shoved the feeling aside and blamed it on the abrupt rush of blood to your head.

“Thank you,” you said, brushing stray blades of grass from your clothes. “Where’s the Guard?”

“Out.” He hesitated, a telltale sign that he was debating the merits of speaking further. “They’ve gone drinking.”

“Why didn’t you go with them?”

“Didn’t want to.”

Did that mean he wanted to be here instead? Even if you had the courage to ask, you didn’t want to push your luck and spoil the moment. You set your hands on your hips, searching for a pastime that could prove more entertaining than sitting idle and watching three men drink away the evening. There were always chores to do, and Ghost was usually content to keep you company as you went about completing them. But with your time together becoming increasingly finite, you didn’t want to waste it on something as boringly routine as housework.

“Let’s take a walk,” you suggested.

“It’ll be dark soon,” Ghost said, dubiously glancing up at the sky. 

You followed his gaze to find a large cloud hanging overhead, streaked orange with the beginnings of sunset. When you tilted your head just right, it vaguely resembled a hawk in flight. The hawk-cloud had to be a sign, you thought, so you waved Ghost off and set off toward the forest. After a moment, he followed. 

You wound up by the river, near the same outcropping of rocks where you usually washed your laundry. In the fading light, the water looked more purple than blue, glittering with the shifting current. You walked along the bank until you found a cluster of smooth stones near the riverbed. Ghost lingered at your shoulder, watching as you picked one up and weighed it in your palm.

“Do you know how to skip stones?”

He shook his head.

“Neither do I,” you admitted, but you tossed the stone out anyway, curving your arm the way you imagined you were supposed to. It struck the surface once before sinking beneath the current. You watched the ripples fan out, ring after widening ring, until the water returned to its undisturbed state.

“Good one,” Ghost teased. 

You would’ve teased him back, thrown out some silly challenge for how he couldn’t do much better, but today you were just pleased that he was still willing to indulge you. You picked up another stone and tried again, only for it to sink just like the first, swallowed up by the current. It was pathetically irrational, but the repeated failure suddenly made you feel sad—those stones might've rested in that exact spot for centuries, but now that you’d gone and disturbed them, they were forever lost underwater.

Resisting the urge to keep fidgeting, you stepped away from the river and tucked your hands behind your back. When you’d first brought Ghost here, you hadn’t cared whether the outing was novel or impressive; all that mattered was completing your work. But now that he had other places he could be—now that he’d deliberately chosen to spend this evening with you—you felt compelled to prove the merits of your presence. How were you supposed to do that by taking him somewhere he’d already seen? You’d run out of new things to offer him before he’d even left.

“You never showed me the river crabs,” Ghost said, as if he’d plucked the thought straight from your mind.

He’d remembered another inconsequential thing you’d said. That absurd flutter returned to your stomach, but you tamped it down before it could fester into something worse. Gathering your skirt high enough to keep the hems from soaking through, you waded into the shallows and crouched beside the rocks to peer underneath. The crabs usually hid in the shade, after all. Ghost followed behind you, barely disturbing the water with each step.

“Watch your toes,” he warned dryly. “Don’t want them bitten off.”

You splashed water at him halfheartedly, but you were too late to realize how close he’d been standing—the spray struck all the way up his shins. Ghost startled for half a second before retaliating with equal force. You gasped as cold water splashed across your skin, then dropped your skirt and splashed him harder in return.

And then you and him were play-fighting in the river like children, the crabs forgotten completely. This entire situation was so ridiculous—facing off against a knight in the lowest-stakes battle of his life—that you couldn’t help the laughter bubbling out of you, loud and unbecoming. The sound echoed through the trees, startling a few birds from their branches and dissolving your earlier unease away with it. Ghost made a strange breathy sound in response, unfamiliar enough that it took you a moment to recognize it as a laugh. 

“We definitely scared them away,” you wheezed, struggling to catch your breath.

“Next time,” Ghost said, before splashing you once more. You let him get away with it, choosing not to question how confidently he assumed you’d be doing this again.

***

It was dusk by the time you returned to the cottage, still too early to sleep. You didn’t want to sit around indoors in damp clothes, but Ghost beat you to the hearth, starting a fire without you having to ask. You picked raspberries from the garden and sat in your usual spot as he stoked the flames, depositing half the fruit in his outstretched palm once he’d settled beside you.

“You’re very capable,” you told him, because he was.

Ghost fixed you with a hard look. “Was that a joke?”

“I was being serious,” you complained. You ate a raspberry and let him wait while you chewed. “But now I take it back.”

He didn’t respond, studying you instead. You drew your knees up to your chest and rested your chin against them, tilting your head sideways so you could study him back. You hadn’t sat this close together since that afternoon in the tavern, but if Ghost was the one initiating it, then it had to be permissible. Besides, there was nobody else around to make you second-guess yourself, nobody to stare or whisper or speculate. You could be indecent in peace.

“You’re capable, too,” he said, somewhat unevenly. He still hadn’t rolled up his mask to eat—maybe he wouldn't do it with you staring at him so intently, but you didn’t want to look away.

“I’ve had a lot of practice doing things on my own.” 

Then you fought the urge to smack yourself—why did you have to say that so dramatically? Still, Ghost didn’t react the way you feared he might; if anything, he seemed to be genuinely considering your words.

“Did your brother help you?” he asked.

“Only when he wanted to,” you said. “He was young, so I usually just let him play instead."

You thought of how you used to wade into the river with him perched on your back, pretending you were two explorers embarking on a grand, fantastical journey. Sometimes you’d fake a stumble just to make him squeal, threatening to drop him into the current, only to catch him again before he could fall in, every single time.

“You must’ve raised him well.”

Ghost’s voice had gone so uncharacteristically soft that it made pinpricks of heat erupt across your skin, warmer than the hearth itself. You wanted more of it, wanted to coax out at least one more sentence of praise, but that desire came tangled with the understanding that it would be significantly easier if all of this—his presence, his attention, the intensity of his gaze—were to cease at once, rather than slowly thinning out the way it had been since his Guard arrived. But that was beyond your control, and sulking would be of no use. You could savor his company while you still had it.

You fixed him with your best imitation of his glare. “Was that a joke?”

Without answering, he tossed a berry at you with perfect aim. It bounced harmlessly off your forehead; you caught it before it could tumble into the grass, wiped it against your sleeve, and popped it into your mouth. Ghost immediately averted his eyes to the fire. You continued watching him, hazy in the rising smoke.

***

The following week, you sat grinding herbs at the table with your back facing the door, but you could tell Soap had arrived without even having to see him. He didn’t knock, for starters, and the way the hinges squeaked gave you the impression that he was making no effort whatsoever to be discreet.

“Come outside, lass,” he called. You glanced over your shoulder, and just as you’d suspected, there he was—cheeks flushed pink, hair crookedly tousled by the wind. “Got somethin’ to show you.”

Dutifully, you rose and followed him outside, expecting a mildly amusing sight at best, perhaps a bird with unusual plumage or another unfortunate bounty of courting gifts abandoned at the edge of your land. Instead, you found Ghost with a horse.

Not merely a horse, but a stallion—the most ferociously beautiful one you’d ever seen. With the limited equestrian knowledge you’d picked up from Ghost, you could tell the animal was exceptionally cared for, with hefty muscle and a lustrous mane. He stood noticeably larger than Soap’s horse, which made sense considering Ghost himself was built larger than most men. His coat was a deep mahogany that gleamed rosily beneath the sunlight, while his forehead was speckled white like scattered stars.

Ghost led the stallion toward you, keeping a gentle hold on the reins. “Got a horse.”

“I gathered as much,” you said, though without any malice; you were too fixated on the animal to bother with pestering him. “He’s so handsome, isn’t he?”

Soap snickered at something under his breath to Ghost, though you couldn’t make out the words. While the two knights lapsed into yet another one of their silent, inscrutable conversations, you stepped closer and cautiously pet the stallion’s neck just as you’d indirectly been taught, recoiling only slightly when the animal huffed a burst of warm air against your shoulder.

The movement immediately caught Ghost’s attention. He turned back toward you, watching carefully while Soap trailed off to climb atop his own horse.

“Have you named him?” you asked.

Ghost rested a hand against the stallion’s neck, right alongside yours. “Not yet.”

Before you could ask anything else, Soap shouted your name brightly from atop his horse, guiding the animal in a giddy little circle. “Fancy a ride?”

Naturally, you wound up seated behind Ghost again. You expected only a short round along the property, just to acquaint yourself with the stallion, who appeared docile and obedient to each of Ghost’s commands, but Soap took the lead and continued further down the path. 

For the very first time in your life, you set off with no clear destination in mind. At first, you assumed he and Ghost might be scouting the area, but the ease with which they navigated each bend and fork in the path betrayed that they’d already explored this stretch of village before. They talked as they rode, cryptically recounting some campaign they’d fought in years past, trading unfamiliar names and places back and forth like pawns in a game only they knew the rules of. You remained quiet, blocking them out in favor of listening to the horses, to the steady clop of their hooves against packed earth.

The path wound past cottages and open farmland, through golden-green fields just about ready for harvest. A gaggle of children stopped to gawk at your small party, shrieking in amazement when Soap urged his stallion into a sprint before reining it back into an easy trot. Further ahead, a farmer paused his work and lifted a weathered hand in greeting, squinting against the afternoon sun. It was odd to pass them all by horseback, to sit elevated above the same people you usually stood among. 

“Are you alright back there?” Soap eventually asked, slowing his horse to fall in line with you.

“Of course,” you chirped, forcing yourself to match his earlier levity. “I’ve just never done this before.”

Ghost huffed. “Been on a horse?”

“Been on a horse for—for leisure,” you corrected. Your gaze drifted over the passing fields before settling on the broad sweep of Ghost’s back. 

“You’ve been missing out, then,” Soap crowed. You knew he wasn’t trying to be rude on purpose, but his words didn’t strike you as particularly pleasant, either. “Cannae say you’ve truly lived till you’ve—”

“You aren’t missing out on anything,” Ghost interrupted, without looking back at you. “Barely have time for it ourselves.”

That managed to soothe you, just for the time being. You leaned forward to speak closer to Ghost’s ear, the same way you had the first time you’d ridden behind him. “Now that you’ve got a horse, will you be leaving soon?”

“Probably.”

“But the festival—”

It was your turn to be sharply cut off, right as the path narrowed beneath a crooked-leaning tree. 

“Watch your head,” he barked out.

Together, you ducked beneath a low branch, but your attempt was far clumsier than his. Your forehead bumped awkwardly against his back—instinctively, you pressed a palm between his shoulder blades to steady yourself. Ghost immediately went rigid, his entire back tensing beneath your touch. He relaxed a half-second later, but by then you’d already snatched your hand away, settling it back against the stallion. 

“Sorry,” you whispered. 

You weren’t sure why you were attempting to be subtle when Soap was already unabashedly grinning at you both, but you kept up the act for Ghost’s sake, just in case.

“Don’t apologize,” Ghost muttered, before flashing a warning look toward Soap, who was clearly on the verge of making another crude, speculative comment. “And don’t you start.”

***

“I need you to read somethin’ for me.”

Ghost would be leaving tomorrow. He’d told you as much earlier in the day, and now the day was nearly over and he was seated at the edge of your bed, clearly ready to retire for the night. Meanwhile, you were still puttering around the cottage, uselessly rearranging your shelves for the second time that evening. You couldn’t bring yourself to lie down just yet; once you did, you’d have nothing left to do except stare at the ceiling and think.

“Can’t you do it yourself?” you asked indignantly, adjusting a vial rack that had already been safely tucked away from the edge.

“I’m busy.”

You turned around to find him doing absolutely nothing. “Clearly, you aren’t.”

“You owe me a favor,” he insisted. 

Of course he’d choose to collect it now—today was his final opportunity to do so—but what you didn’t understand was why he was making the same exact request you had. Perhaps, if you played along, he’d offer up another detail or two in explanation. You crossed the room and intentionally stopped a few paces in front of him, holding yourself back from standing directly between his legs. 

Ghost handed you a scrap of parchment. It wasn’t the fancy sort you associated with merchants or nobility, but the same inexpensive kind your brother used whenever he wrote to you, with a few lines sprawled across one side in plain black ink. As you looked it over, you attempted to take a deep breath, but your throat snagged mid-inhale. Ghost sat and watched you stupidly cough into the crook of your elbow, betraying no reaction when you thrust the parchment back into his grasp. 

“I need to tell you something,” you said unsteadily, once you’d regained some semblance of composure.

“Tell me, then.”

You desperately wished for Soap to burst through the door and drag you away on another pointless horse ride. You wished for Gaz to appear and launch into another informal conversation about money and marriage prospects and freshly baked bread. You would’ve even accepted Price interrogating your mental aptitude if it meant escaping this situation. Was this really how Ghost wanted to spend your final evening together? Not bickering or reminiscing or even quietly basking in each other’s company, but embarrassing you instead?

“Sir Ghost,” you began slowly, hovering at the very precipice of humiliation. “I’m illiterate.”

Ghost silently considered the revelation. It shouldn’t have been particularly shocking—the vast majority of villagefolk couldn’t read or write—but you’d built your entire life around your competence. People trusted you to help them because they believed you knew things. Admitting ignorance, especially the same sort of ignorance they carried themselves, felt like it’d threaten your very livelihood.

“I figured,” Ghost said. “You were looking at that map upside down in the tavern.”

You wanted to snatch the parchment back from him, tear it apart into a million tiny pieces, and scatter them all throughout the forest. Or maybe it’d be a quicker alternative to shove the paper straight into your mouth instead, to eat it whole so that neither of you would have to see it ever again. Stubbornly, you forced yourself to study the inked lines, attempting to decipher meaning from their shape the same way you’d tried with the map. There weren’t enough words for a proper message, unless it was some sort of military code. But if it were, Ghost wouldn’t be showing it to you at all. 

“Is it an address?”

“S’where we’re headed next.” His voice went gritty at the edges, even harsher than usual. “Thought I’d give it to you, in case you wanted to write.”

Write to him.

“I’m sorry,” you said helplessly.

What you couldn’t bring yourself to say was that scribes were expensive, that you already rationed your money cautiously enough just to write to your brother a handful of times a year. You kept his letters tucked away in the chest partially so you wouldn’t be tempted to burn through your savings replying to each and every one. But beyond that, you couldn’t simply reject this—not when it was such a momentous thing for him to offer, especially given his profession.

It was nearly impossible to imagine he hadn’t discussed it with his Guard beforehand, or at the very least weighed the decision carefully on his own. Maybe you could send Ghost a letter in the wintertime, splurge on it if the rush of the cold months brought in enough money. You weren’t sure what you’d even share with him—perhaps a few stories about the women you met, or bland descriptions of the thousand repetitive tasks you completed every day and week and month and year. Nothing exciting enough to stand level with the life he lived, but maybe he already knew to temper his expectations. Maybe he preferred it that way. 

Before you could think better of it, you stepped directly into the slot between Ghost’s legs. His hands shifted slightly, pausing for a moment near your hips before settling atop his own knees.

“I like being alone,” you blurted out, swallowing hard before continuing. “I know it’s uncommon, but I really do prefer it. I like doing things how I want them, and I like taking care of myself. But I—it’s been nice having you around.”

And then you waited for him to finally tell you everything. You wanted a confession in return for all the pieces of your life you’d already shown him, some grand unveiling of the mysteries you’d staunchly avoided pressing him about. Who had poisoned him all those weeks ago, what his real name was, why he’d remained with you even after his Guard arrived; where he’d come from, why he’d stayed in your village, what sort of upbringing had turned him into this odd, secretive man sitting at the edge of your bed. 

Instead, Ghost just looked at you for a long moment and said, “You should go to sleep, girl.”

The dismissal felt like he’d dumped a bucket of freezing water over your head. It wasn’t fair of him to act as though what you’d just admitted could be blamed on nothing more than fatigue, as if one night’s rest might dissolve your feelings entirely by morning. But if he did acknowledge this properly, with all the sword-sharp attention and precision you knew he was capable of, then what? You couldn’t even write. 

“I don’t like it when you call me that,” you said, not only because it was true, but also because it was the only way you could protest against him. 

“What should I call you instead?”

“My name is fine.”

Ghost said it just once; you shivered despite yourself. In response, that unfamiliar, breathy sound escaped him again—his laugh. It should've irritated you, but instead you merely felt relief that at least one of you could find a trace of amusement within this situation. 

Then he set the parchment aside and reached for your hands. You let him take them exactly how he wanted, leaning into the rough scrape of his skin against your own, warm and calloused and real. He interlaced your fingers together and held them up as if on display for you both. Standing between his knees, you allowed yourself to fall pliant, wondering for one dizzy, dangerous moment if he might draw you even closer. 

He didn’t. That was probably a good thing, you thought, because then all of this would truly become too much to bear.

***

The next morning, Ghost left shortly after breakfast—your last meal together—promising you he’d come back to say goodbye before he left for good. You were in the garden when he finally came back, hands aching from pulling weeds—it’d been Ghost’s chore while he’d stayed with you, but now that he was leaving, you’d have to reacquaint yourself with the task.

An occasion like this should’ve been accompanied with rain or fog or, at the very least, a dense overcast. Instead, the sky was mercilessly bright, warming you and the soil and the plants down to the very root. Ghost was dressed in full armor, just as he’d been the day you first met him. His sword rested properly at his hip, secured within a polished new scabbard. He sat astride his stallion, outfitted in fresh leather tack, and rode all the way up to the garden like he’d come to carry you away, but he simply dismounted and gave the horse a firm pat against his flank. 

“Found a name for him,” he said by way of greeting.

You reached out, smoothing your hands over the stallion’s pinkish-mahogany coat. “What is it?”

Ghost looked at the garden, then back at you, then at the garden again. He seemed uncertain, shifting beneath your attention in a way that reminded you of when he’d asked whether he could continue staying with you even after his Guard arrived. You felt a twinge of sympathy at his discomfort, but you refused to relent, staring into his eyes so intently that you were certain they’d haunt your dreams for weeks to come. Dreams you’d wake from alone, in the bed you’d have to relearn how to sleep in after all that time on the floor.

“Raspberry,” he said at last.

Your hands stilled against the horse’s neck. “Why?”

“He’s the same color.”

There weren’t enough words in the world to contain what that did to you, so you threw your arms around him instead.

It was a stilted embrace, more like hugging a blank vessel than a real person. Ghost’s armor dug into your cheek and chest while his arms settled stiffly around your waist, so hesitant that it felt like he was barely holding you at all. You found yourself wishing you’d done this earlier, before he’d hidden his skin away beneath all of this metal, but you doubted he would’ve accepted your touch so readily otherwise.

You didn’t tell him it was the first proper hug you’d initiated in years. The women you helped usually embraced you in gratitude after successful deliveries, and their unruly young children sometimes clung your legs until you gently shook them off. But those moments had always been fleeting, inconsequential. This was different because of how badly you wanted it, because of how you’d consciously chosen it first.

“Will we meet again?” you asked, with your face still smushed against his breastplate.

His answer came out muffled through the armor. “I can’t promise you anything.”

“You don’t have to.” You drew back just enough to look up at him, keeping your arms looped around his middle. “I just—if you were able to, would you?”

“I would.”

He uttered it so quietly that you nearly dismissed it as wishful thinking, a foolish invention of your own imagination. But then you remembered how intentionally he’d held your hands yesterday, how deliberate he’d been whenever he touched you the handful of times before. How readily he was accepting you now. This had to be real.

You stepped away and withdrew the small jar hidden in your dress pocket, accepting that you were no different from the market girls after all. You could be older than them, more independent, more capable of maintaining your own livelihood, but deep down, you still wanted the same impossible things they did. You stood exactly the way they had before him: a village girl presenting a silly, earnest gift to a mysterious knight in hopes of being chosen.

“This is for your scars,” you said, your heart painfully lodged somewhere in your throat as you held out the salve. “I made it for the mother you took me to visit, but I had extra. It should help with irritation once the weather turns cold.”

Ghost accepted the jar warily, balancing it in the center of his gloved palm as if he was afraid he might accidentally crush it. For what would likely be the final time, you longed to see his face. You wanted to know whether he was surprised, whether he was pleased, whether he was feeling anything at all beneath that dreadful silver skull. More selfishly still, you wanted something tangible from him in return, beyond an address you could barely use—some object to anchor your thoughts to once he was gone. Memories shifted with time, softened around the edges no matter how fiercely you tried to preserve them. But you knew it’d be unfair of you to ask, so you didn’t.

“Thank you,” he said roughly, with the same begrudging gentleness he’d shown you the night before. His armor shone so brightly beneath the sun that it almost hurt to look at him.

You hugged him again. It was unnecessary and overwrought, especially given the length of your first embrace, but he allowed it anyway.

***

Gingerly, you withdrew the letter from where you’d tucked it beneath your supplies. It didn’t quite resemble a letter as much as it did a discarded wad of parchment—the messenger had delivered it to you with an apologetic smile, citing his arduous journey from the coast as the reason it had arrived so crumpled. You didn’t entirely believe him, as none of your previous letters had received such mistreatment, but what was done was done. You’d accept your brother’s words in any condition as long as they were legible.

“Can you read this to me?”

You pressed the letter against the tabletop and attempted to smoothen it out with the heel of your palm before sliding it over to Ghost. He eyed the paper suspiciously before lifting it gently with his fingertips. You’d seen him handle delicate objects several times over, but it never failed to amaze you, as unusual as a brown bear picking wildflowers or a wolf dabbing its mouth clean after a meal.

“Can’t you read it yourself?” he grumbled, squinting at the ink.

You gestured to your cluttered workstation, pestle in hand. “I’m busy.”

It technically wasn’t a lie. As summer flew on by, your services were being called upon with rapidly increasing frequency. You were currently processing the raspberry leaves you’d plucked and dried last week, grinding them in your mortar to use in remedies you’d prepare tomorrow. They were easier on the stomach in powdered form, a necessary consideration for pregnant women. You weren’t entirely sure why Ghost had decided to provide you with his company, but you didn’t mind it. He was too quiet to be distracting.

“Only doin’ this once,” he said, pausing to clear his throat. “So be quiet and listen.”

Despite claiming that you were busy, you let your hands still as he began to read. The first word Ghost spoke aloud was your name, which he announced haltingly, as if it were a question. He didn’t use your name often, preferring to either address you as girl or nothing at all. You rarely spent time with him in the company of others, making it so that he never had to specifically identify who he was speaking to. It was always just you.

“I hope you’ve been well. You’ll be pleased to know that I’ve been advancing with my studies. I recently learned how to set a fractured leg. The bone was broken in two places, isn’t that awful? The patient recovered enough to walk again, though he now has a limp that won’t ever go away. What intrigued me was that all we had to do was adjust the bones; his body healed the break all on its own. I’m sure that mother would draw some sort of wisdom from the situation, but I haven’t quite figured it out yet.

“The coast is beautiful in the summertime. I’m getting better at swimming. The neighbor’s son has been helping me learn. His grandfather owns a sailboat and promised he’ll take us out one of these days. Can you imagine sailing on our river? The current would carry us all the way to the King’s castle. Aunt dislikes when I visit the beach because the sand sticks to my clothes and tracks all over the house. Otherwise, she and Uncle are both healthy and send you their best wishes. All my love.”

Ghost finished off with your brother’s name, which sounded absolutely bizarre coming from his mouth. This entire experience was unsettling: hearing Ghost speak so much at once, hearing him relay words he hadn’t written, hearing him use the word love. You began to set down your pestle, but it slipped from your grasp and clattered onto the table, threatening to roll over the edge until Ghost stopped it with his hand. You closed your eyes and took a deep breath. 

“Thank you,” you said, as sincerely as you could manage. 

After steadying yourself, you took the letter back from him and rose to deposit it in the chest by your bed, joining the collection you’d maintained and steadily been adding to for the better part of a decade. You lingered there, brushing your fingers along the stack of parchment, well aware that Ghost was watching you, probably scrutinizing your odd behavior.

“Your brother’s a doctor?”

Ghost’s return to speaking in clipped sentences brought you more relief than expected. You hadn’t told him the letter was from your brother, but him figuring it out wasn’t much of a testament to his observational skills; your brother was the only person you’d mentioned that was still alive and cared for you enough to write to you. 

“He’s an apprentice,” you said mildly. You shut the chest and took excessive care in securing the latches. “He won’t be a physician for a few more years.”

“Physician and midwife,” Ghost mused, somehow entertained by the notion. “S’your family trade, then? Healing?”

“I suppose so.”

That was one way to see it. If your skills were compared side by side, your brother’s carried greater value and recognition. He could work in the castle, work in the King’s army, work virtually anywhere in the Kingdom. You could only work where there were women, or where there weren’t enough doctors. You could very well teach yourself to fix a fracture, but you didn’t have access to the resources your brother did, patients and textbooks and experienced masters of the profession. You didn’t mind it, though. That had been the whole point in sending him away—for him to live a better life than the one he would’ve had with you. 

***

The following morning, you were watering your garden when Ghost stepped out of the forest. He’d slipped away sometime before dawn, and while his absence had been the first thing you noticed when you woke, his missing sword had been a close second. Now, he approached you with the massive blade in hand, gleaming just as it had the night before. Had he missed out on the opportunity to use it, or had he simply wiped it clean before returning? And why hadn’t he worn his armor? Was he truly so skilled that he didn't need the protection?

Ghost’s exposed skin was flushed, shining with sweat. You weren’t faring much better, with the entire bodice of your dress clinging to you like a second skin. You pushed your questions aside and tipped the bucket to let water spill over your herbs, watching it vanish instantly into the dry, thirsty soil. You wouldn’t complain if someone subjected you to the same treatment. 

“You should do this later,” Ghost said as he settled beside you. He angled himself so the hand holding the sword stayed furthest from you—whether it was intentional or not, you were unsure.

You frowned. “Why’s that?”

“Too hot outside,” he groused, as if he hadn’t also been out all morning in this weather.

He had to be suffocating beneath that mask, especially in this humidity. You wouldn’t ever dare to ask, but you were quite curious as to why he wore the garish thing. Maybe he was concealing an injury, a scar more twisted and gruesome than the one on his lip. Maybe it was some kind of royal custom, an indication of how high he’d risen in the ranks. Or maybe it was simply another one of his inexplicable habits, as peculiar as his proclivity for silence and tendency to reject any and all romantic advances sent his way.

You stuck your hand out to him. “Give me your hand.”

Ghost agreed without hesitation, placing his rough palm atop yours. He’d finally accepted that you weren’t a threat, you thought, which had pride blooming in your chest as if it was an enviable accomplishment. You loosely grasped his hand and guided it into the bucket of water, still blissfully cold from the well. He let out a short exhale at the chill, his fingers fluttering against yours. 

“Feels nice, doesn’t it?” you asked, unable to hold back your grin. “It’s a trick my mother taught me. If you cool your hands down, the rest of your body will follow.”

He just looked at you. You were standing awfully close to each other, close enough for you to make out the pale blond of his eyelashes, the creased skin beneath his eyes, the steady rise and fall of his chest beneath his damp shirt. A small metal chip was coming loose on his mask, one of his silver skull-teeth. 

You fought back a shiver, though it had nothing to do with the water. He was still holding your submerged hand, making no effort to release you, disregarding any and all notions of propriety. Not that either of you had much to begin with, but still. 

“Is the midwife here?”

You whirled around, separating yourself from Ghost so frantically that water splashed onto you both. Standing before you was a little boy, chest heaving and face streaked with tears. You stepped forward, discarding all thoughts of Ghost and your garden and the unrelenting summer heat to focus on the matter at hand. While his body was trembling and his breathing was labored, he didn’t appear to be greatly injured, but you couldn’t draw assumptions without gathering more information first.

“That’s me,” you said gently, crouching down to meet his gaze. “What’s the matter?”

The boy took a deep, shuddering breath. “My mother needs your help.”

***

You hadn’t attended to such a grueling delivery in years. A premature birth, made worse by poorly-healed complications from the mother’s first pregnancy. You weren’t one to wish ill on others, but the gnarled mess of scar tissue on the woman’s abdomen had you seething. Someone else’s incompetence had cost this woman her good health, caused her pain that not a single soul in this world deserved to experience. 

After stitching the mother up, instructing her husband to watch over her until your return, and ensuring their newborn daughter was healthy enough to survive the night, you began the long walk back home, all alone in the dark. Your legs were sore by the time you approached the cottage, your anger dulled into solemn fatigue, but you still attempted to tread lightly to avoid waking Ghost. He afforded you the same courtesy, after all.

The door swung open right as you were reaching for the handle. You were too tired to startle at the sight of Ghost in the entryway, clearly about to leave. You squinted at him, struggling to make sense of his sudden appearance. He stared back with equal confusion, inspecting you from head to toe as if he’d never seen you before in his life.

“Why on earth are you awake?”

“You look terrible,” he said, tactlessly dodging your question.

“I know,” you glumly replied. There were patches of dried blood all over your dress, as well as a large stain on your sleeve from when you’d used it to wipe the tears off the little boy’s face. But you felt more disappointed than embarrassed, overcome by the needlessness of today’s suffering. When you blinked, your eyes shut for a moment too long, sending you careening forward before you abruptly caught your balance on the doorframe.

“What happened?”

Ghost’s voice was harsh, urgent. He was concerned, you realized—a notion so absurd you would’ve burst out laughing if you had the mental capacity to do so. You clumsily pushed past him to set your haphazardly-packed baskets on the floor, flinching when you bumped into him along the way. 

“It was a stressful delivery.” You drifted over to the corner of the room, where you stored your bedroll during the day. “They’re both fine for now, but I’ll have to visit again in the morning. I’m going to sleep for a bit—just wake me if you need anything, Sir Ghost—”

He followed you, hovering just a fraction too close. “Take the bed.”

You gawped at him. “But then where will you—”

“Not sleeping tonight.”

“Are you going somewhere?”

This time, Ghost avoided your question by reaching out and taking your hand.

It wasn’t how you’d done in the day, flimsy enough to give him an out if he changed his mind, but instead so firm that you had no choice but to relent. You attempted to pull back anyway, resisting out of bewildered instinct, but Ghost merely pulled harder, dragging you over to your own bed. The ridges of his callused palm scratched against your skin, sending a wave of goosebumps coursing up your arm. His touch felt good, your sleep-addled brain surmised, but you strictly forbade yourself from dwelling on that thought.

Then both of his hands were clasping yours, guiding you down onto the mattress. You awkwardly laid down while he watched, turning to face the wall to spare yourself from his gaze. As you drifted off into sleep, you heard the telltale creak of the door opening again, except it was fainter than usual, significantly more drawn-out, as if someone was taking great care to minimize the sound.

***

You woke to someone jostling your shoulder. Blearily, you cracked one eye open to find Ghost peering down at you, awash in morning light.

“Go away,” you mumbled, curling further into yourself. Even after a full night’s rest, the residual dregs of exhaustion remained in your limbs, urging you to stay in bed.

He shook you harder. “Haven’t you got work to do?”

The reminder was pressing enough to cut through your drowsiness, but his hand was warm and heavy on your shoulder, threatening to lull you back asleep. You forced yourself to push through, blinking unsteadily until the world came into focus. Ghost looked the same as he always did, tall and broad and dangerous, but he wasn’t alone. 

There was another man at his side, a stranger dressed in half-armor. You yelped, jolting upright with such poor coordination that you would’ve toppled onto the floor had Ghost not steadied you.

“Who are you?”

“Sorry, lass,” said the stranger, speaking with an accent you couldn’t place. He smiled at you, equal parts charming and mischievous, as if he was preparing to share an inappropriate joke. “Didn’t mean to scare you.”

“This is Soap,” Ghost said curtly. “He’s with the Guard.”

Soap nodded, evidently pleased by the fact. His frame was packed with almost as much muscle as Ghost, his forearms littered with a similar smattering of scars. The sides of his head were shaved, with a thick stripe of brown hair running down the middle. How unique, you thought, tugging at the strings of an old story you’d heard at the market. 

So the Guard had finally arrived to fetch their missing knight. They’ll find me when they need me, Ghost had previously told you, but neither man seemed to be in much of a hurry. Their nonchalance was even more unsettling than the prospect of them marching off into battle—had they really just been standing there, watching you sleep? 

You shrugged Ghost’s hand away and kicked off your threadbare blanket, momentarily befuddled by its presence; you had no memory of drawing it upon yourself. Clambering out of bed, you offered Soap your own name—utterly forgettable in comparison to his—and straightened out your wrinkled dress, wincing as you realized you were still in your dirty clothes from yesterday. With all the time you’d spent together in such close proximity, you couldn’t care less about what you looked like in front of Ghost, but you weren’t sure how a different man of high status might react to the sight of such an unkempt woman.

“I apologize for my—my appearance,” you stammered, swiping a hand across your mouth in case you’d drooled in your sleep. “I wasn’t aware you were coming. Would you like something to drink, Sir—”

“Don’t worry your pretty head about all that.” Soap waved you off, then sharply elbowed Ghost in the ribs. “Didn’t realize you two were so cozied up in here.”

Ghost elbowed him back. “S’not like that.”

Maybe you should’ve been offended by the insinuation, but you couldn’t bring yourself to care. The villagefolk had been running wild with the same rumors, if not worse. At least Soap had the courage to say it to your face. 

Soap laughed, unfazed as he swept a glance over the cottage. “Nice place you’ve got here.”

It really wasn’t. Your baskets still sat abandoned by the door, the table cluttered with half-finished projects and drying herbs, the sheets on your bed in rumpled disarray. Ghost’s sword was propped up near your bedside, so close that you could’ve grabbed right then and there, though you couldn’t conceive of an idea of what to actually do with it. Take it outside to prune your plants, maybe.

“Thank you,” you said graciously, deciding against correcting Soap about it not technically being yours. “You’re welcome to stay for as long as you’d like, but I—I need to go now.”

Soap fixed you with a hard look, every last trace of charisma disappearing at once. You reflexively took a step back, pulse quickening in alarm.

“Go where?”

“I’ve got work to do,” you said, helplessly parroting Ghost's earlier words.

Soap ignored you in favor of turning to Ghost, clearly waiting for him to vouch for you. Ghost narrowed his eyes and Soap narrowed them back; Ghost nodded curtly and Soap immediately relaxed. The exchange was strangely domestic in its efficiency, reminiscent of an old married couple so familiar with each other that their communication had eclipsed the need for speech. Perhaps Soap was only behaving this way to intimidate you further, but the ease with which both men regarded one another convinced you that it was genuine. 

“I can take you,” Ghost said, once he’d finished with his wordless conversation. “You’ll reach quicker on horseback.”

You blinked in surprise. “But you don’t have a horse.”

“I’ll borrow Johnny’s.”

“Who’s Johnny?”

“I’m Johnny,” Soap cut in, lauding you with an exaggerated wink. “Soap’s just a nickname. We’ve all got ‘em.” 

Despite all of Ghost’s secrets and strange habits, it’d never once occurred to you that Ghost might not actually be his real name. You pinched your arm to make sure you weren’t still dreaming.

***

Soap owned a restless grey stallion, sleek with muscle and radiating unadulterated power with each stride. While seeing you off, he’d proudly informed you that this was a horse bred and raised specifically for battle, a destrier. You now understood why Ghost had been so unimpressed by the selection at the market. 

And so you wound up on a borrowed stallion, trying your absolute hardest to avoid pressing your chest against Ghost’s back as he rode. You tensed your abdomen to keep your balance, riding astride rather than sidesaddle—now you’d made acquaintance with a second unmarried man, you reasoned that any further descent into indecency was negligible. 

“You’re quite good at this,” you told him, raising your voice to be heard over the thunder of hooves. Wind rushed past you, a reprieve from the heat. 

“Wouldn’t be much of a knight if I wasn’t,” he brusquely replied.

You knew Ghost was strong. You’d known it the moment you met him, when he managed to fight against you even while incapacitated. But this was your first time witnessing him exert himself so naturally, effortlessly managing a stallion that wasn’t even his. Maybe he was relieved to finally be doing something befitting of his title, rather than lowly household chores or mysterious expeditions in the forest.

“How old were you when you learned to ride?”

He was quiet for a moment. “Eighteen.”

“A century ago, then.”

Ghost looked over his shoulder to level a sharp glare your way. You smiled back at him. He scoffed under his breath and turned forward again.

The mother lived in a cottage similar to yours, small but relatively well-maintained. At her bedside, you changed her dressings while her husband pensively watched, cradling their newborn daughter with one hand carefully supporting her head. His wife had no female relatives, he told you, so he’d be the one looking after her. You taught him how to inspect her skin for infection and how to keep the baby warm until she reached a healthier weight, then gave him a jar of salve to use on the mother’s scars. His willingness to learn alleviated some of the indignation you’d felt yesterday, replacing it with an exhausted sort of relief—at least she wouldn’t be recovering alone.

When you stepped back outside, you found Ghost and the stallion right where you’d left them, waiting beneath the shade of a hefty oak tree. Ghost was crouched beside the little boy who had run to fetch you the morning before. You froze, waiting for the child to panic at the sight of Ghost’s mask, for Ghost to send him crying back to his parents.

Then, to your utter astonishment, he lifted the child onto the horse. 

Ghost kept one loose hand on the reins and guided the stallion into a slow circle around the tree. You couldn’t hear what either of them were saying from this distance, but the boy’s laughter carried easily through the air. It continued until Ghost finally helped him back down, sending him sprinting off toward the house, clumsy with excitement.

You wondered if reuniting with Soap had put him in an unusually good mood, or if he would’ve treated the boy like this regardless. Ghost had a younger sibling, you remembered. He knew how to draw water from a well and harvest firewood from the forest. He hadn’t seen the sea until a few years ago, and he’d only learned to ride horses once he’d come of age, likely after joining the army. The details were sparse, little more than scraps, but combined with his scars and demeanor and unwillingness to speak about himself, you could piece together that he hadn’t had a particularly easy life.

You approached Ghost without mentioning what you’d seen. His shoulders were still relaxed as you settled on the stallion behind him, but instead of turning toward home, he guided the stallion down an entirely different path.

“Where are we going?” you asked, leaning in as much as your confidence allowed. Ghost talked straight into your ear sometimes, like when the market was noisy and he wanted to pass a comment in private; it was only fair that you were allowed to do the same. 

“Tavern,” he said. “Rest of the Guard’s there.”

You frowned. “Why do I have to come?”

“Figured you’d want to meet them.” He leisurely steered the horse around a bend in the road, simple to him but a remarkable feat to you. “See if your little stories are true.”

“They aren’t my stories,” you protested, but the realization that he’d even remembered such a frivolous conversation made your stomach flutter. 

***

There was only one open seat at the table, but before you could move to fetch another chair for yourself, Ghost dragged one over and sat down beside it. You nervously settled into the remaining seat, crowded tightly between him and Soap, swallowing down your apprehension as you listened as the remaining two members of the Guard introduced themselves.

Captain Price looked exactly how you imagined a captain should: gruff and weathered with age, bits of grey threaded throughout his bushy mustache. Sir Garrick—who insisted you call him Gaz, though you still didn’t quite understand this nickname business—was the youngest of the four and by far the kindest-looking. When he smiled at you, bright and sunny, a thousand girlish fantasies suddenly made perfect sense. This, you thought, was where the market girls should have been directing their attention, instead of wasting their affections on a churlish Ghost.

You offered your own name for the second time that day, ignoring the stares drifting over from the barmaid and other tavern patrons. One woman seated beside four large men was bound to attract scrutiny.

Soap clapped a hand onto your shoulder once you were finished, his touch lighter and more amicable than Ghost’s had been this morning.

“Isn’t she bonnie?”

You blanched. “What did you just call me?”

“Don’t mind him,” Gaz sighed, offering you an apologetic smile. “It’s very nice to meet you. Honestly, I can’t believe you’ve managed to tolerate Ghost all these weeks.”

“He isn’t that bad,” you said tentatively. Ghost flashed you an unimpressed glare while Gaz just laughed.

Price ordered ale for the table. He ordered one for you as well, but you didn’t care much for the taste, so after politely suffering through a few sips, you pawned the drink off to Soap after he’d finished his own. Ghost drank more carefully than the others, angling his head just so as he worked around the mask, the same way you’d seen him do a hundred times over.

Rather than any discussion of violence or politics or other knightly affairs, the men traded meaningless jokes and vague observations about their journey. The tavern wasn’t particularly busy, but there were enough prying eyes and wandering ears around to discourage any worthwhile conversation. Nearby, a serving girl cleaned the same table with all the urgency of a snail, stealing glances at them whenever she thought no one was looking.

You listened quietly, watching their dynamic unfold. Price was unmistakably the leader, commanding the flow of conversation without having to force it outright. Soap was loudest of them all, restless like his horse, while Gaz balanced him out with his composure. After weeks spent deciphering Ghost through little more than his eyes and posture, having full access to the other three men’s expressions was jarring. It felt strangely invasive to view them so openly, like stumbling across a creature stripped of its natural armor—a beetle without its shell, a snake without its scales. 

Eventually, Price withdrew a folded map and spread it flat across the table. You curiously leaned forward to get a good look at it. Maps were rare enough that you’d only ever glimpsed a few in passing. The parchment was yellowed, the ink beginning to fade, but the details had been meticulously drawn and labeled.

“Could you show me exactly where we are?” Price asked you.

Your heart leapt straight into your throat. You were undeniably the least qualified person at the table to answer that question—even Ghost knew the local geography better than you did. But you had the uneasy suspicion that they already knew where they were, that this wasn’t really a genuine question so much as an assessment of your ignorance. Maybe they wanted confirmation that you truly were just a clueless village woman who had stumbled into a good deed, not someone deliberately watching for a particular knight. 

You bent over the map, searching for familiar landmarks first. The dense patch of green was forest, and the broad wash of blue could only be the sea. Your brother existed there, somewhere unreachable beyond the ink and parchment. Even though the representation of distance had been shrunken down a thousand times over to fit within the paper, the gap between you and him seemed impossibly vast when laid out so plainly before you. You forced yourself to reexamine the forest, finding a thin blue vein between the trees.

You turned to Ghost, pointing without daring to touch the map itself. “Is that the river in the forest?”

“There’s only one river in the forest,” he grumbled. His knee knocked into yours beneath the table; you pressed against him to ground yourself, traitorously pleased when he didn’t pull away.

“I’d guess that we’re somewhere around…here?”

You drew a circle in the air over the edge of the map, between where the forest markings thinned out and the Kingdom ended. Even the map itself was worn thinner there, a tiny tear in the parchment carefully mended with adhesive. 

“You’d guess,” Price echoed, sounding unconvinced.

“I haven’t seen many maps before,” you admitted sheepishly, withdrawing your hand to wipe your clammy palm on your skirt. Gaz gave you a sympathetic look that should’ve helped but didn’t. “Are you planning your return?” 

Price refolded the map and tucked it in his pocket. “We’ll be staying here for a bit first.”

All of them seemed to implicitly understand how much time that constituted, leaving you alone in the dark. You didn’t bother to ask another question, simply relieved that this strange trial was over, though something unpleasant still prickled beneath your skin, the pathetic awareness of how little you knew and how little they didn’t. 

You cast a discreet glance toward Ghost, feeling very much like the serving girl still creeping nearby. As you’d predicted, he was already looking at you. For one single shameful moment, you found yourself wishing it was only the two of you here, respectably seated across from each other rather than squashed side-to-side. It never felt this uncomfortable when Ghost poked at you, maybe because you knew you were allowed to poke back.

“Our village’s harvest festival is soon,” you said, shoving the wish aside. Though he wasn’t your captain, something about Price compelled you to defer to him, to put on your best behavior. “I’m sure everyone would be honored to have you all in attendance.”

“We'll see,” Price replied noncommittally, shifting his focus back to the men.

Chapter 4!

***

Not pregnant, then.

You put on a performance for her sake, glancing over your shoulder even though you already knew he wasn’t there. Ghost was off in the forest, laying a breadcrumb trail for his Guard or hunting down the people who’d poisoned him or whatever else it was that knights did when they were stranded in unfamiliar places. You hadn’t pestered him about it because you were certain he wouldn’t share, but also because he’d bought your silence by helping with your chores before leaving. 

“I’m sorry,” you said. “I’m afraid you just missed him.”

Her fidgeting ceased. “Can you give this to him? And tell him it was from me?”

From behind her back, she pulled out a ceramic jar of fruit preserves, with a thin scrap of ribbon tied around the lid. You stared at it, dumbfounded. Preserves weren’t a rare delicacy—you made your own each autumn with the berries you grew—but they carried a different meaning as a gift, especially when given from an unwed woman to an unwed man.

“Do you want to come by later and give it to him yourself?”

She pushed the jar into your hands, turning away. “No, thank you. I have to be home before the storm.”

You watched her scurry back down the path, pity blooming in your chest. Like most girls you knew, she’d likely grown up fantasizing about something beautiful and wonderful happening to her, something to help her escape from the mundane life awaiting her: marriage, childrearing, labor till death. How miraculous would it be if the mysterious knight was that something? If he courted her in full armor, fought for her hand with his sword, whisked her away to the castle on his steed?

Except you found yourself pitying Ghost, too. Yes, he was a knight. Yes, he was big and broad and imposing in a way that implied he’d be a good protector, a favorable husband. But he was also a blank slate, the anonymity of his face and background allowing people to project their own desires onto him. The single detail he’d let slip about his mother was your only indication that he even had an identity of his own. 

When he returned in the evening, right before the first roll of thunder, you promptly handed him the gift and fulfilled the girl’s request. You embellished the story as you told it, tinting the encounter the same rosy color of her dress, emphasizing that she was good-looking and thoughtful and yet to be married.

He sat unmoving at the edge of your bed, the jar looking like a thimble in his paws. You stood before him and decided to interpret his stillness as immense delight. Then his eyes flickered up to yours. 

“The fuck am I supposed to do with fruit?”

Ungrateful and ill-mannered, as per usual. Every drop of pity you’d felt for him evaporated at once.

“Eat it, I presume,” you drawled, slow enough for his thick skull—the real one, not the mask—to process it. “Have you never received a gift before?”

Ghost said nothing. You watched him lightly turn the jar multiple times over, as if he was inspecting it for cracks. Then he gingerly pinched the ribbon between his thumb and pointer finger, tugging at the scrap until it came undone. The girl would suit him well, you thought—they were physically complementary, big and small, imposing and timid, but they were similar in that they were both the quiet type. Maybe you could stage a meeting the next time you went shopping, serve as some kind of mediator to bridge them together.

***

After breakfast the next morning, Ghost accompanied you to the river without invitation, likely because he had nothing better to do, prowling behind you in that silent, catlike way of his. The forest soil was damp and your arms were laden with a basket of unwashed laundry. The past few days of summer rain had rendered it impossible to wash or dry anything, but you’d finally been blessed with a day of sunshine to attempt the task.

You settled at your preferred strip of riverbank, where the flow was gentle and the chunks of rock were gritty enough to scrub your sheets against. You began working lye soap into the bloodstained linens first, the ones you’d used when tending to women pre- and post-labor. Ghost sat on the rock beside you, perched like an oversized owl on a tree branch, keeping away from the frigid water despite the heat beating down on you both.

“Watch your toes,” you warned him anyway, scrubbing vigorously at a particularly resistant stain. “A river crab might try to bite them off.”

“There’s no such thing,” he grumbled. From the corner of your eye, you saw his feet shift.

“Yes, there is,” you argued. “They’re the size of a fist, and they like to hide in the shade. I can show you one later. But my brother told me—wrote me, I mean, in one of his letters, that the ones by the sea are much larger.”

“You ever been?” 

“Been where?”

“To the sea, girl.”

You laughed, shaking your head. “I’d love to, but I only get to travel when I’m called upon for deliveries.”

What an ignorant question, you would’ve snarked, had he asked you a week ago. But the last time you had company while doing laundry was back when your mother was still alive, and the last person you’d warned about a river crab was your brother, back when he was still little enough to be carried on your shoulders. Ghost’s presence was a drastic change from the solitude you were accustomed to, but you didn’t entirely dislike it. 

You didn’t entirely dislike him, you were realizing, as the days continued ticking by. It was nice to have someone to talk to and eat with and sit beside in the evenings, and it didn’t hurt that he’d taken over his share of chores without being asked—the most demanding ones, like fetching water and chopping wood and weeding your garden. He was more tolerable when he was useful, even with his unspoken threats of violence perpetually hanging over your head. 

“Where all have you traveled, Sir Ghost?” You wrung the sheet out and dunked it again for a second round of scrubbing, ignoring the water splashing onto your skirt.

“Lots of places.”

You resisted the urge to flick water at him. “How descriptive.”

The moment lapsed into silence. You continued working, laying the washed linens on the rocks to dry as you moved on to the next. Your mother had taught you to keep your supplies as clean as possible, to maintain what you had for as long as you could. Midwives that served high-status families could afford new linens for each delivery—some noblewomen even purchased their own supplies, not wanting to taint their labor with any trace of someone else’s ordeal—but you weren’t anywhere near that category, nor would you ever be.

Ghost eventually stood, wading into the river without rolling up his pantlegs. You would’ve teased him for it if he didn’t look so forlorn, a misplaced splotch of night amidst the greenery surrounding you both. The contours of muscle in his back were visible through the fabric of his shirt, shifting with each step he took. 

“Saw it for the first time a few years ago,” he said roughly, while facing away from you. You had to strain your ears to hear him over the rushing water. “S’like you’re at the edge of the world. Nothing but water.”

The lye was already making your hands itch, but his words had you tingling all over, like a body-wide bee sting. You hadn’t known Ghost for long, but it was safe to assume that he didn’t speak like this often. Honest for no apparent reason, sincere for no strategic gain. You found yourself wishing, suddenly, that he was a sliver more expressive, so that you’d be able to understand why he was telling you this, so that you’d know how he’d want you to respond.

“That sounds lovely,” you said, hoping he’d be able to tell that you meant it. “My brother described it the same way. Maybe I’ll see it one day, if I’m ever able to visit him.”

When you finished, you gathered up the damp sheets back into your basket. You’d hang them up on the clothesline when you returned. Then you hopped off the rocks, hoisted up your skirt, and walked straight into the river. Ghost quickly turned, but you made no effort to come near him. You stood on your own in the shallows, relishing in the feeling of cold water against your skin, of the silt and sand and mud beneath your feet, tethering you to the natural world. 

***

The next gift came a few days later.

“I’d like to speak to Sir Ghost,” the second girl said, far more assertive than the first. She was in a blue dress and wore her hair loose around her shoulders, save for two small braids pinned away from her face. She was a full head taller than the last girl, standing with her feet planted firmly in the grass.

“Of course.“ You waved Ghost over, flashing him your politest smile as he lumbered to your side. He’d just come in from chopping wood and was sweaty all over, but his stature wasn’t a terrible sight to behold. “Now that I think about it, I left something by the garden. I’ll be back!”

The girl stepped aside for you to duck out of the cottage. You left swiftly, without checking for Ghost’s reaction. Approaching a man took courage, and you didn’t want to cause the girl any more anxiety by lingering nearby. In your garden, you knelt in the dirt and plucked a few raspberry leaves, just to pass the time. You could dry them out for tea, maybe, or soak them in wine for a tincture. Women preferred the teas, since they tasted better, but the tinctures were stronger, suited for difficult deliveries.

Though your bushes were large and generous, they were nearing the end of their lifespan, having been planted by your mother when you were still a child. Sometimes you felt like hugging them, taking them up into your arms and hoarding all of their flowers and leaves and fruit for yourself. You’d never act on the desire, of course, selfish and irrational as it was, but you ached for it all the same. You settled for picking a few berries instead, snacking on them as you waited, sour-sweet on your tongue. 

“You didn't have to leave,” a voice rumbled from above. 

You tipped your head back, still chewing, to find Ghost standing over you, only marginally less sweaty than before. His shadow fell across you, cooling the air like the shade of a tall tree. You glanced around for the girl, but she was nowhere in sight. 

“I thought you’d want some privacy.”

“S’your house.”

“My brother’s, actually,” you said, because women couldn’t own houses. “What did she bring you?”

Ghost opened his palm, revealing a square bar wrapped in brown paper and tied with twine. You caught a whiff of something pleasant, distantly floral. He began reaching out, as if to give it to you, but then his gaze flickered to your hands—one clutching a clump of leaves, the other sticky with raspberry juice—and he quickly aborted the movement.

“Is it soap?” you asked, ignoring his judging stare. “That’s a terrible gift.”

To your surprise, he humored you. “Why’s that?” 

You shrugged, biting the inside of your cheek to keep from smiling. “I think it implies you don’t bathe enough.”

Ghost took a menacing step forward, his knees threatening to knock into your back. You briefly worried if he was going to strike you down, flatten you into the bushes and brambles and destroy your garden entirely, but then he just huffed and tucked the soap bar into his pocket. You picked a few more berries to distract yourself from laughing and quickly stood, holding them out to him in silent apology. He took them from your outstretched palm, callused fingers scraping against your skin. 

“Did you like her?” you asked.

“No,” he said shortly. You kept your eyes trained on the grass as he lifted his mask to eat, more pleased by his responsiveness than you’d like to admit. 

“Why not?”

He was quiet. You lifted your head after a moment to find his lips stained pink with fruit, smeared lightly over his scar. You wondered if the tissue ever bothered him in the wintertime, if he ever struggled with the skin cracking or burning with phantom pain. Then you wondered why you were concerning yourself with such irrelevant matters.

***

Midwives were busiest in the autumn, when births surged and cold-related maladies began cropping up. Your summers were usually spent preparing for the rush: the heat allowed you to harvest and dry larger quantities of plants for remedies, and the longer evenings gave you a few extra hours of productivity each day.

This afternoon, you sat at the table and sorted through a batch of dried mugwort. Carefully, you separated the feathered leaves from their stems—they were too hard and bitter for most concoctions—and deposited them into two ceramic bowls. Half would be saved for tea and half would be pressed into oil. You were so absorbed in your work that you didn’t notice Ghost preparing to leave until the door creaked open.

You looked up abruptly, realizing your torso was nearly parallel with the table with how intently you’d been leaning over your work. 

“Where are you going?”

“The market,” he said, with one foot inside and one out. His brown eyes glimmered like amber in the sunlight. “There’s horses.”

Of course the valiant Sir Ghost needed a horse. What was a knight without one? Traveling merchants stopped by your village from time to time, hawking foals and mares and the rare stallion, creatures the majority of your neighbors could only ever dream of owning. All you knew about the animal was how to sit and keep your balance while someone else led you to wherever you were needed. You could barely imagine the freedom that came with possessing the ability to ride, the privilege of being able to travel at the slightest whim.

“May I come with you? I could use the break.”

And you were curious about the process of purchasing a horse, a feat that nobody in your life had ever managed to accomplish. But he didn’t need to know that. 

While waiting for his reply, you straightened up and lifted your arms above your head, wincing when you heard your joints crack. Ghost watched as you did, causing you to briefly become excessively aware of yourself: of your poor posture habits, of the earthy scent of mugwort clinging to your skin, of how your dress strained against your chest as you stretched. Then you remembered that you’d seen him in significantly more compromising positions—delirious with his head in your lap, unconscious with half of his limbs hanging off your bed—and the insecurity quietly slipped away.

“C’mon, then,” he said, only mildly begrudging. It made you smile.

***

“How’s this one?”

There were five horses for sale, tied to makeshift wooden posts at the edge of the market. One was sickly and lame, with his left hind leg bowing inward; two were young, still too small to ride; and two were healthy and robust, though they were both mares. You were scratching the neck of the larger one, wishing you’d brought her a treat. She was well-built and beautiful, fourteen hands tall with a coat black as ink. Growing up, you’d merely coasted past the horse display whenever it came by, but this was your first time stopping to look, to touch. You felt as if you’d stepped into an alternate, fantastical reality, one where knights were commonplace and horses weren’t a luxury.

“She’s not strong enough,” Ghost murmured, his mouth dipping close to your ear. “Idiot’s just fattened her up for sale.”

The merchant, a wealthy man with a northern accent, had practically swooned when he caught sight of Ghost approaching, ignoring you completely. He’d immediately stuck himself to Ghost’s side, waxing nonsense about how honored he’d be to provide a horse for the Kingdom until Ghost barked at him to shut up and stand back. Now he was hovering near the posts, staring at you both with hungry interest. 

“That’s awful,” you said, but it made cruel sense—horse trading was lucrative, and all lucrative businesses attracted deception. “What kind of horses do your Guard ride?”

“Depends on where we’re going.” Ghost ran a hand along the mare's coat, sweeping yet gentle, far more skilled than your own ministrations. “

Ghost ran a hand along the mare's coat, sweeping yet gentle, far more skilled than your own ministrations. “What’ve you heard of them?”

You mentally sifted through all the stories you knew, scouring your memory for even a single inoffensive detail, one that didn’t betray any more village-girl yearning than what he’d already been exposed to. Ultimately, you failed and resigned yourself to sharing what amounted to little more than dreamy gossip.

“There’s four of you—one of them’s the Captain, one of them has unique hair, and one of them has a pretty smile. And you’re all very handso—very competent and strong.”

Ghost practically guffawed, as mirthful you’d ever seen him. “You fancy them, or somethin’?”

Your cheeks burned as you dropped your hand. “You asked what I’ve heard!”

The horse paid you no mind, leaning further into Ghost’s touch instead. He took his time inspecting both of the mares, offering you clipped observations about their age, musculature, and stamina. He had an unusually sharp eye, you were beginning to realize, and he was far more knowledgeable than he let on. Your mother used to say that the most intelligent people were the ones who didn’t have to announce it, and while you’d always taken her words as an attempt to coax you into speaking less, Ghost fit the description perfectly.

Eventually, he concluded that neither of the mares suited his needs. You bid all five horses farewell before leaving, watching their long lashes flutter as they blinked, listening to their square teeth click as they nickered. The lame one looked at you with such overwhelming sorrow that it made you pause. You stepped closer and tried stroking his neck the way you’d seen Ghost do, hoping it'd provide him even the smallest scrap of reassurance. You weren't sure you wanted to know what became of sick horses when they went unsold. 

When you turned back to Ghost, you found him already staring at you, his gaze burning with an intensity you couldn’t quite determine the source of. As you retreated, the merchant called after you, squawking more gibberish about a discount—he was willing to go half-price on the mares, anything to be of service to one of the King’s most trusted knights—but Ghost just ignored him and pushed on, back up the winding path to your cottage. 

“What’d the stories say about me?” he asked, once you’d left the market behind and were ambling under a dense canopy of trees. Fallen leaves and overgrown grass crunched beneath your feet; the foliage barely whispered beneath his.

“You conceal your face,” you said bluntly. “And you’re brave.”

“What would you add?”

It was odd to hear Ghost inquire about his own self. While he was confident, he didn’t strike you as particularly vain. Maybe this was another one of his tests, but he’d been staying with you for two weeks now—had you not proved yourself to be trustworthy? 

“You’re quite tall,” you said, without bothering to cushion your words. You were well-aware of how much he detested your attempts to be sweet or demure. “And ill-mannered.”

“Careful,” he warned, but his voice had taken on the same lilting tone as earlier.

You felt emboldened by his amusement. “Are you missing your Guard?”

His answer came remarkably fast. “They’ll find me when they need me.”

You ducked beneath a low-hanging tree branch while Ghost sidestepped it easily, moving with a sense of grace that contradicted his heft. He was the first knight you’d ever met, but you figured he had to be exceptional. You’d grown up alongside a few local boys that had joined the King’s army once they’d come of age, but they’d done so in search of steady meals and a warm bed, rather than for glory or to fulfill any personal desire to protect the Kingdom. Ghost, on the other hand, gave the impression that this was his life’s calling.

***

You were cleaning up the hearth after dinner when the third girl arrived. As her figure drew closer, you stood to retreat back inside, but Ghost fixed you with a glare so potent that it kept you glued in place. Then you were subjected to participating an interaction so awkward that it made you want to crawl out of your own body and bury yourself in the forest.  

It wasn’t the girl’s fault. She was young and pretty like the last two, though clearly hailing from a much wealthier family. She had ribbons accenting her dress, braided into her hair, and wrapped around the handle of her basket. You knew her parents well—her father owned most of the village’s farmland, and you regularly bought lard and tallow from him to use in your remedies. She had better marriage prospects than anyone else you knew. Ghost was still far above her station, but out of all his visitors, she had the shortest distance to climb. 

“This is for you, Sir Ghost,” she said, confidently holding out her basket to him. 

Ghost took it with great reluctance, as if doing so caused him physical pain. You busied yourself by checking the hearth again, though you already knew the embers had long since died. It was bold of her to visit so close to nightfall, but maybe she believed boldness was what it took to catch a knight’s attention. Or maybe she’d been strategic with her timing, intentionally arriving so late that he’d have no choice but to escort her back home in the night. You could appreciate the romance behind the idea.

Together, you and the girl both waited for Ghost to speak. Crickets chirred as the sky darkened into dusk, but the silence within your impromptu gathering only continued to stretch on.

“Have you explored much of our village yet?” she eventually asked. You looked up to find her smiling at him, hands neatly clasped together. Her skin was radiant with good health, clear evidence that she’d never labored outside or gone without a meal. “I would be honored to show you around.”

“Already seen it,” he said gruffly.

Her eyes flickered over to yours, quietly pleading for help. 

“Her family owns a beautiful farm,” you said clumsily, unsure of whether you were speaking to her, Ghost, or the cooling embers. “I’ll need to stop by soon for more tallow. Sir Ghost could accompany me.”

“Don’t speak for me,” he snapped.

You flinched; the girl jolted. While you were accustomed to Ghost’s harsh manner of speaking, the gritty sound of his raised voice still sent a jolt of fear down your spine, rattling you to the bone. The girl wasn’t faring much better, already turning sharply on her heel, though not quickly enough to hide the stricken look on her face, her dreams undoubtedly shattered. It really was too late for her to walk home alone, but neither you nor a glowering Ghost offered to accompany her. You told yourself you’d apologize the next time you saw her.

“Remember your place, girl,” Ghost said, voice low and dangerous, while she was still within earshot. 

You waited until your nerves settled back down, holding your tongue until the girl was no more than a speck in the distance. 

“Don’t you want a wife?” 

He faltered. “What?”

You wiped your ash-streaked hands on your skirt and pulled the basket from his grasp, feeling both irritated and satisfied when he didn’t resist. He followed as you marched back inside, pushing aside an empty vial rack to make room on the table. Within the basket, arranged atop a neatly folded cloth, were six speckled eggs, a bundle of wildflowers tied with yet another ribbon, and a small jar of clotted cream. A note lay tucked beside them, written in elegant script. The entire display was so childish and earnest it made you uncomfortable.

“That’s what all of this is for,” you said, gesturing to the gift. “These girls are asking you to court them. Why haven't you married yet?”

He sternly crossed his arms. “That’s none of your business.”

“You’ve asked me the same thing!”

Ghost sat down without a sound. You avoided the note and flowers, focusing instead on the food, if only to distract yourself from the present matter at hand.

The eggs would keep for a few days, but you’d have to use the cream before it spoiled. You found some bread and the fruit preserves he’d received earlier. Cutting a thick slice, you spread a generous layer of cream, then added the fruit on top—some kind of mixed berries, by the look of it. You handed it to Ghost without bothering with a plate. You didn’t need to ask if it was good; he rolled up his mask and finished it in three bites.

You prepared another slice for him and one for yourself, pleased by your own ingenuity, though somewhat guilty that the ingredients had been prepared by hands other than your own, intended to be enjoyed by a person other than you. Ghost didn’t seem to mind that you were serving yourself his offerings, abstaining from speaking again until you were sitting across from him and working through your own slice. Unlike him, you ate in small bites, savoring each burst of richness and fighting back a delighted sigh as you did. Dessert was a rare indulgence for you, and clotted cream was a delicacy on its own.

“My Captain—his name’s Price—says we should start lookin’, but I…”

You paused mid-bite. Ghost’s admission had you hooked, even if it was halting and incomplete. This was the part of the story you never got to hear, the part about what the knight wanted from the girl he’d so gallantly fought for. The vast majority of personal conversations you’d attempted with him had gone absolutely nowhere, but given that he’d been more forthcoming over the past few days and had just revealed the name of his Captain to you, you figured that you were allowed to pry a little further.

“But what?”

“Haven’t found a bird I like yet,” he muttered. You made a face at his phrasing, thinking of an insult to throw back at him, but then, to your surprise, he added: “What about you?”

Ghost stretched his legs beneath the table, his foot nudging against yours. You’d grown used to the contact by now, inappropriate as it was. You licked a stray smear of cream from your thumb, searching for the simplest explanation. There was no single reason why you hadn’t wed, but rather an amalgamation of smaller issues, too insignificant for a man of his status to comprehend: you had no notable lineage, no dowry, no real assets other than your hands. Women who had raised younger siblings would make good mothers, but women who lived alone and worked on others’ bodies would make poor, promiscuous wives.

“I can’t give up my work,” you said, eschewing any mention of your brother. “My mother was a midwife, and my grandmother before her. I had a few offers when I was younger, but none of them—there wasn’t a man who'd allow me to keep working after marriage.”

“You aren’t a dog,” Ghost huffed. The scar on his lip was almost shiny in the low light. “Don’t have to be allowed.”

That wasn’t exactly true, but you appreciated the sentiment anyway. You chose to forgive him for his earlier behavior and made him a third slice as a reward, which he finished just as quickly as the first two.

***

A hush fell over the market girls as you joined their circle. As you’d predicted, there were plenty of rumors circulating about the knight, about his unfriendly demeanor and his questionable arrangement with the midwife, about his marriage prospects and conspicuous lack of interest in anyone who approached him. If he really had turned down the richest girl in the village, what hope did anyone else have?

Ghost was elsewhere, attending to whatever secret business he had going on. Usually, you liked that he left you alone to run your errands in peace, but you currently found yourself wishing for his presence, if only to divert the others’ scrutiny away from yourself. 

“The harvest festival is soon,” one of them eventually said, pointedly looking at everyone but you.

“I’m having a new dress made,” another added, forcing dull excitement into her voice.

They tentatively fell back into conversation, discussing the clothes they’d wear and the festivities they’d partake in. You wiped sweat from your brow and listened with only half of your attention, wondering if this moment indicated that you had officially outgrown their company. There had always been distance between you and them, given your age and line of work, but it had become even more pronounced after Ghost’s arrival, colored in with a dark shade of resentment or envy or maybe just confusion. It had to be perplexing from an outsider's perspective, why the knight had attached himself to an old and unmarried woman over literally anyone else, even if it more out of necessity than attraction.

As you scanned the market and contemplated making a graceless exit, you finally caught a glimpse of Ghost at the fringes of the square. You shifted your basket to one hand and lifted the other in a small wave, though he was already moving toward you.

“Hello there,” you said when he reached your side, greeting him as if you hadn’t been together less than an hour ago. The girls went quiet again, curiously observing you both as if you were horses on display. Ghost would fetch a drastically higher price, of course, a line of thought that almost made you bitterly laugh out loud.

He didn’t look at anyone but you. “You’re done?”

“Yes,” you chirped, making no effort to disguise your relief. 

Ghost plucked your basket right out of your hands, the exact inverse of the action you’d performed a few days before. It was heavy with your purchases, but it seemed weightless in his grip, light as a feather.

You gawked at him. “Sir Ghost, I can carry it myself—”

“I’ve got it,” he said firmly, promptly turning to leave. You hurried to catch up with him.

The gifts stopped coming, after that.

Not a monster, then, but rather a knight. Likely injured, given his ragged breathing and the uneven sway of his gait. 

You dropped the shears and leapt to your feet, sprinting to catch the knight before his legs buckled. Lowering him into the grass felt like trying to lay a boulder to rest, but you managed regardless, aided by the familiar rush of strength that always overtook your limbs in times of urgency.

“Where are you hurt?” you asked, kneeling at his side to survey his body. His armor was scuffed yet devoid of bloodstains. Any number of maladies could be hiding beneath—cracked ribs or heat stroke, contusions or fever. You had a fix for most of them, but you couldn’t work without proper examination first.

“Back off,” the knight groaned, weakly lifting a gloved hand. To swat you away, presumably, but he was so sluggish that you dodged it with ease.

You dipped your head low and peered into his black-rimmed eyes, the only part of his face he’d left uncovered. The skull was nothing more than bits of silver metal studded to dark fabric, giving the impression of bones. 

You’d never met this man before, but you’d heard enough stories over the years to recognize him. The masked knight, brutal and revered, a member of your King's most trusted Guard. Him and three valiant others, traversing distant lands and seas to fight for your Kingdom. He kept his face hidden from the world, the girls at the market had prattled, but they spoke of his handsomeness as an irrefutable truth. How could a man with such an alluring tale be anything less?

“Sir Ghost,” you pleaded, testing the name you’d learned from the market girls, dodging another swipe of his paw. “I’m a midwife, and I have knowledge of medicine, but I’m not a doctor. I’m just a woman—I mean to say, I have no authority to cause you harm. Please let me help you.”

His gaze darted about, taking in what little he could of his surroundings while laid flat on the ground. You prayed that he’d catch sight of something that would lend your words some credibility, whether it was your stout cottage at the forest’s edge or the red raspberry plants you’d been pruning before his arrival.

“Somethin’ I drank,” he finally rasped. “Poison.”

“Poison,” you repeated. You looked over his body again, but there was no exposed skin to check for rashes or measure his pulse. “Do you know what kind?”

He managed a slight shake of his head, glaring at you all the while. You were too deep in thought to fully register his animosity. Given that he was still lucid, the dose couldn’t have been too potent, but you needed to act quickly. You knew the antidotes for common poisons in your region, and you could just administer them all in hopes that one would take, but fetching them from your cottage would cost time you weren’t sure you could spare.

You combed through the knowledge the previous midwife had imparted you with, a strong-willed woman who had also been your mother. She’d taught you medicine by spoken word alone, by having you recite her own sweeping principles instead of facts from dusty books. She’d insisted the finer details were intangible, that you’d pick them up with experience. If she were still around to guide you now, her instructions would’ve been simple: if it shouldn’t be there, remove it.

Swiftly, you repositioned yourself behind the knight, gripping the straps of his breastplate to hoist his head into your lap. You settled one hand on the back of his neck and scrabbled at his front with the other, searching for the edge of his mask. He thrashed in protest, attempting to knock you over with what little strength he had left. You braced yourself and held your position, even as his armor dug into your thighs, scraping over the thin cotton of your skirt.

“I’m sorry for this,” you said, as gently as you could manage. You yanked his mask upward, dislodging his metal skull. “I promise I won’t look.”

Except you did, just for a fraction of a second, to confirm that you’d exposed his mouth and the lower half of his nose. Then you screwed your eyes shut, willing your mind to forget the sight of him, blindly feeling around for his lips. You pressed two fingers against the seam of them, catching the bumpy edges of what you knew to be scar tissue. 

His breath was hot on your skin. After a heavy moment of hesitation, he relented and opened his mouth for you. 

You promptly shoved your fingers down his throat, twisting his head just in time for him to vomit into the grass.

***

Once the knight regained enough energy to sit, you hauled him up to his feet, draped one of his tree-trunk arms over your shoulders, and guided him to your home. 

He collapsed in your bed with a pained sigh while you busied yourself with scouring your shelves, searching for the vial rack that held your antidotes. You’d brewed them a month ago for the sake of refreshing your skills, another practice instilled in you by your mother. You were grateful for her now, grateful for her always.

“I’m sorry,” you said again, lifting his mask a second time to tip the contents of each vial down his throat. Fervently, you prayed that your treatment would prove effective, that the knight hadn’t fallen victim to a poison you couldn’t cure. Your village existed at the fringes of the Kingdom, and you couldn’t begin to fathom how far you’d have to travel to find him help otherwise, or if you’d even have enough time to do so.

You quelled the anxiety the same way you handled stressful deliveries, by staying on your feet and keeping your hands productive. You brought him water in the only unchipped cup you owned—the earthenware was turning brittle, having been in your family for generations—and a damp rag to wipe his mouth, pointedly looking away until you heard the rustle of fabric being tugged back down. Then you inspected him for a third time and fought back a laugh.

A living, breathing mountain of a knight, the first you’d ever seen in your lifetime, laying sick in your tiny bed. For a moment, you allowed yourself to wish that your brother still lived with you. He would’ve been delighted with such a visitor, would’ve attacked this strange man with a thousand curious questions at once, injured or not.

“You must be uncomfortable, laying in your armor like that,” you said, crouching on the stone floor to level your gaze with his. If he were a regular patient, you would’ve taken his hand as you spoke, but his glower alone was more than enough to deter you. “Sir Ghost, may I—”

“Touch the mask again and I’ll slit your throat,” he warned. His voice was drowsy, slurring at the edges, a sure sign of the medicine taking effect.

Slowly, you pulled the gauntlet off his massive right hand, oddly elated when he made no effort to resist. You felt his wrist for a pulse—the rhythm consistent but harried, quicker than it should’ve been. His skin was pale and scarred and shone with sweat. It was truly sweltering in here, with the combined heat of the summer day and two adult bodies jammed into a room meant for one.

“You’re burning up,” you murmured, more to yourself than him. You set the gauntlet on the floor beside you, then reached for the other.

You carefully removed each item of his armor, fumbling with the complicated buckles and straps, feeling as though you were shelling a behemoth river crab. The knight was complacent as you worked, having drifted into a feverish sleep even as you jostled his body in your efforts. Beneath the armor, he wore a simple black tunic and pants, sweat-drenched and pulled taut over muscle. He smelled like it’d been some time since he’d last bathed, like sweat and dirt and leaves.

You fetched a second rag, dipped it in a bucket of cold wellwater, and ran it over all the bare skin you had access to. His hands and feet and collarbones, his eyelids and the visible sliver of neck between his mask and shirt. You wanted to do more, but not without receiving his permission, so you resigned yourself to waiting.

The sun had set a while ago, your only indication of how much time had passed. You scrounged up a hunk of stale bread and a handful of berries for dinner, eating at the old wooden table that doubled as your workstation. Then you fell asleep, slumped over in your chair while dazedly contemplating what you’d feed the knight once he was awake.

***

You rose at dawn. The knight was right where you’d left him, still asleep in your bed with his armor neatly arranged on the floor. His breathing was even and steady, his skin dry and warm. You checked his pulse again, relieved to find it slower. 

There was no telling how long it’d take him to return to consciousness, so you went about your chores like usual. You tidied your workstation and drew more water from the well, tended to your garden and started a fire at your small outdoor hearth. You chopped vegetables for a simple stew, something for both of you to eat once he woke up. It would’ve been nice if you had some meat to add, but you didn’t want to venture all the way to the butcher’s in case he woke in your absence.

Around midmorning, you stepped into the very line of trees the knight had stumbled out of. You weren’t sure what your objective was, but you felt compelled to follow the trail of footprints he’d left in the dirt, as if they’d lead you back to wherever he came from. 

Since childhood, you’d considered the forest sacred, wild and unruly and belonging to no individual. You loved the cool shade of the trees, the chatty birds and squirrels and hares, the clumps of wildflowers that bloomed each summer. Today, however, the beauty was marred by the sight of a broadsword abandoned in a patch of grass, right where the footsteps ended.

Your breath caught in your chest as you stared at it. Silver and sleek, undoubtedly belonging to the man in your cottage, the blade crusted over with a thick layer of dried blood. You were near the riverbank, but the rush of water was barely louder than the sound of your own heartbeat hammering in your ears. Why was such a violent weapon here, so close to where you lived, and whose blood was on the blade?

You lifted the sword with considerable effort, swallowing down your unease. It was more unwieldy than you’d expected it to be, clearly forged for someone significantly taller and stronger than yourself. You persisted regardless, lugging it all the way back home.

When you opened the door, you took two steps and came face-to-face with the knight. He loomed over you, deathly silent, poised like he’d been waiting for your return all this while.

“You’re awake! How are—”

He took you by the throat and slammed you against the wall so harshly that your shelves rattled, followed by a short cacophony of glass shattering. The sword clattered to the floor as your hands flew to your neck, clawing at his grip. He pushed back harder, choking you with enough force to make your vision swim.

“Stop,” you cried, flailing uselessly, kicking at his legs to no avail. “Please—please, Sir Gho—“

“How’d you know who I am?”

“Every—everyone knows,” you wheezed. You dug your nails into his forearms, rewarded by the slightest release of pressure to take a single gasping breath. “They tell stories of—of you and the Guard—please—”

He released you without warning. You collapsed to your knees, coughing and sputtering at his feet. Then he was the one crouching down to meet your gaze, except you were too busy reacquainting your lungs with the air to make sense of his sudden shift in behavior.

“Didn’t realize I was so popular ‘round here.”

His voice was rougher than it’d been yesterday, no longer thin with sickness. The black around his eyes had rubbed away to a faint grey, revealing the pale, pinkish skin beneath. You sucked in another greedy breath and tentatively felt your neck, terrifyingly aware you were being watched. Your skin was tender, likely bruised.

“The forest separates us from most of the Kingdom.” Each word made you wince, scratching your throat on its way out. “You’d think people would be less interested in its happenings, but the distance only makes them even more curious. You could buy a loaf of bread with a good enough story.”

He leaned in even closer, settling one hand beside his fallen sword. “Is that what you were looking for? A good story?”

“I was just looking to help!” you yelped, scrambling back against the wall as his fingers curved around the handle. “I have no ill intentions, I promise—”

“Dunno if I can believe that,” he said. The blade looked natural against his frame, less like a weapon and more like an extension of his own limb. “Already broke your first promise.”

You thought back to yesterday, when you’d briefly exposed his face to save him. The rising fear in your chest was replaced with a hot burst of indignation. Your floor was a mess, broken vials and discarded armor strewn about. You’d toiled an entire day to save this man, had retrieved his sword for him while he slept in your bed, had imbued each of your actions with as much kindness and reverence as his status deserved. And then he’d nearly strangled you in your own home.

“Are you a fish?” you blurted out. 

The knight went still. “What?”

“Show me where your gills are,” you snapped. This was becoming dangerous, but you couldn’t bring yourself to stop speaking. “Next time I’ll help you drink from there instead. Our village has no doctor—even if someone else found you, they still would've called on me to tend to you. Just look.”

You swept an arm out, inviting him to inspect the single room that held your entire life. The shelves along the wall, chock-full of herbal remedies and supplies; the blemished worktable with its mortar and pestle and two rickety chairs; the chest at the foot of your bed that held your scissors, linens, and what little valuables you owned; the birthing stool tucked away in the darkest corner of the room, draped in white cloth to protect the wood from insects and dust.

Except the cloth was askew, and one of the latches of your chest was undone. The shelves you’d spent hours upon hours organizing were haphazardly arranged at best. Had he gone through your things while you were out?

“Already did,” he said gruffly, confirming your suspicion.

You gaped at him. “Then how come—why’d you attack me?”

“Had to make sure.” Of what, he didn’t say. He stood with his sword in hand, impassively peering down at you. “Should watch your tongue, girl. A mouth like that’ll get you in trouble.”

“And if I don’t, Sir?” you asked. His words were unsettlingly familiar, reminding you of how your mother used to chide you for talking too much, for behaving too untoward. “Will you choke me again?”

He loudly exhaled through his nose. “I just might.”

***

You hadn't shared a meal with a man in ages. Ghost followed you outside, sitting opposite the hearth as you served him a bowl of stew and the last of your bread. Both of you were barefoot and quiet, the midday breeze a reprieve from the stuffiness of your cottage.

Ghost ate like he was afraid his food would grow two legs and run away. He’d peeled back his mask just enough to reveal a strong jaw and lips bisected by a large pink scar, the same one you’d felt yesterday. You would’ve found it endearing, had he not squeezed your neck so hard that it currently hurt to swallow.

“Do you know where you’ll go next?” you asked, in lieu of asking how on earth he’d ended up in your tiny, backwater village. You’d be lying if you said you weren’t curious about him, attack notwithstanding, but you also knew better than to directly pry at political matters.

“Can’t say,” he grumbled. You set your own bowl aside when you noticed his was empty, reaching for the pot over the hearth. “Have to wait ‘til my Guard finds me.”

His Guard. You ladled him a second serving as you wracked your memory for what you knew of the other men involved, but all you could think of was the market girls speculating what it’d be like to have a knight for a husband. Some immature, ugly part of you wanted to scorn them for it, but it wasn’t as if they had a choice the way you did. How could you fault their interest, when marriage was the most surefire path towards securing a comfortable life? When knights were known to be good, honest men, leagues better than the ones you’d all grown up with?

“There’s a tavern further in the village. I can take you there, if you’d like.”

His reply was stiff. “Don’t have much coin on me.”

“I doubt they’d make you pay." Your village hadn’t seen such a well-ranked, intriguing visitor in years—they'd be falling over their own feet to host him, laud him with more comforts and fineries than you’d ever be able to afford. “But you’re welcome to stay with me, if you prefer that instead. Though it won’t be as lavish.”

“‘S fine,” he muttered. A bird flew overhead, cawing loudly before disappearing into the trees, while your stomach turned at the realization that he was legitimately accepting your offer. “Best to stay by the forest.”

“And I'd be able to watch over your recovery,” you added lamely, unsure whether it was for his sake or your own. 

A woman like yourself, housing a formidable man like him—if he really did stay with you, the rumors would be salacious and inevitable. The pretense of his illness might’ve provided you some shelter from scrutiny, if his condition hadn’t already drastically improved. Thanks to your own hands, you noted, with no small amount of pride.

“Where’s your husband?”

The pride went away.

“I don’t have one,” you said, gritting out a smile. Given that he’d rifled through your belongings, he must’ve already known this. You chalked the question up to him testing your trustworthiness; a mental trial to complement the physical one. “I have a younger brother—this land is in his name—but he lives with our aunt on the coast.”

He might’ve known this detail, too, if he’d seen the sheaf of letters in your chest. You’d never read them, but you knew their contents like the back of your own hand. Joyful and lilting, so full of light that just thinking about them made your chest ache.

“A bit old to still be unwed, aren’t you?”

“Are you sure you’re a knight?” you thoughtlessly asked. “I thought they were supposed to be gentlemen.”

He glared at you. It was tiring you out, having to gauge his expressions based on his eyes alone. You stuck your spoon in your mouth to keep yourself from digging the hole any deeper.

***

On Ghost's third day with you, you took him down the winding path to the market square. Occasionally, you came here to peddle your own homegrown herbs and remedies, but this time you had a list of tasks to complete. You first dragged him to the tailor for new clothes, paying extra to have them made in the darkest available fabric, then to the butcher's and baker's shops. To nobody’s surprise, you drew attention everywhere you went, stares clinging to you both like burrs. 

Somewhere in between, he finally slunk away from you, muttering something about a horse. You breathed a sigh of relief and finished the rest of your shopping like normal, blissfully alone.

When you finished, you caught sight of the girls you usually spoke with, all clustered near the center of the square. Though you were several years older and had little in common, you enjoyed their company—they were bright and energetic, albeit a little too eager to gossip about other villagefolk. Today, however, dread curled in your stomach as they approached, already knowing who their target would be.

You lingered awkwardly at the edge of their huddle, scanning the rest of the market for your new houseguest, but it seemed as if he'd vanished into thin air. Maybe he really was an apparition and you had finally gone crazy. Except the girls had seen Ghost too, and now they were expounding on each and every one of their observations about his appearance and demeanor, forcing you to listen and accept that the brute existed in the same reality you did.

“He’s so tall,” one of them gushed.

“And so strong,” echoed another.

“He must be fed well in the King’s castle,” you said mildly, forcing indifference. It was one thing to badmouth Ghost to his face, another to disrespect a knight in public; insulting a man opposed to insulting the Kingdom.

“How’d you meet him?”

It felt traitorous to admit the full truth, so you didn’t. But what lie would you tell instead? That you'd found him in the forest while you were mindlessly frolicking about? That he'd been sent by the King to resolve some nonexistent matters in your irrelevant village? That your paths had crossed unexpectedly, but he'd treated you with so much kindness and benevolence that you'd offered up your own home in exchange for absolutely nothing?

“He was passing by and needed some…assistance," you settled for saying. A simple statement, not technically untrue.

“Is he injured?”

“How long is he staying for?”

“Can you convince him to speak with us?”

“Are you done?”

The last question was lower than the rest, spoken close to your ear. You nearly jumped out of your skin, whirling around to find Ghost standing behind you with his arms crossed. The muscles in his forearms were firm and flexed, the silver of his mask glinting in the sunlight as if it were jewelry, simultaneously pretty and intimidating. How long had he been lurking there? You hadn’t heard even a single footstep in your direction.

“Yes, Sir Ghost,” you said breathlessly, gripping your basket tighter. You ignored the girls’ stunned faces and headed back together.

***

The following evening, you were called to a neighboring village to assist with a delivery. Ghost was sitting on the floor, polishing his armor with one of your rags and some sort of oil he’d gotten at the market. You scurried around him as you packed your things, performing your usual ritual while doing your best to avoid encroaching his space. The expecting mother’s eldest son was waiting outside, having brought his horse to fetch you. 

“I’ll be out for a while,” you said, rummaging through your chest for your scissors. “If things go well, I should be back in the morning.”

He made a short noise of acknowledgement, sweeping the cloth over one of his greaves. A single leg of his was capable of more force than your entire body—with how many patients you’d tended to over the years, you were no stranger to human anatomy, both male and female, but Ghost was another specimen entirely. Broad and impendent, perpetually tense.

“Have you ever seen a woman give birth?" you asked, just for the fun of it.

His hands didn’t stop moving, but you could’ve sworn they faltered, just for a faint moment. You held your breath for his reply, waiting for him to scoff and call you stupid or simple or daft.

“Once,” he said roughly. “Helped my mum.”

“Really?”

In the four days you'd spent with Ghost, this was the first scrap of information he’d offered up about his life. But this wasn't an inconspicuous fact, like his surname or where he'd grown up, but rather one that was disturbing, borderline morbid. Even in the most dire of circumstances, childbirth was an affair strictly reserved for women; Ghost’s family must've been truly isolated—or impoverished, or both—if he had to assist his own mother. It was difficult to imagine him in such a situation, to imagine him witnessing a process so gruesome and complex as a mere child. To imagine him having a mother, a father, a younger sibling.

He carried himself like he didn’t exist beyond his knighthood. But maybe that was typical for men of his status, and you were just ignorant of the custom. You finally found your scissors resting above your collection of letters, wrapped in tight layers of cotton. You retrieved them and skimmed your fingers over the covered blade. Ghost’s sword was propped against the wall beside your bed, clean and polished and close enough for him to grab in his sleep.

“It’s a violent experience,” you said. “Don’t you think?”

He didn’t reply.

***

You returned home just before dawn. The early morning air was crisp and cool, clouds rolling over the sky as it began to lighten. You tiredly pushed open the door, baskets balanced on your hip. The room was cloaked in shadow, only partially obscuring Ghost at your table. His eyes were open and trained right on you. 

You nearly keeled over right then and there. “You’re already awake?”

“‘S morning, isn’t it?”

You weren’t sure why you were so surprised. Ghost usually woke even earlier than you did, moving about so quietly that it never disturbed your sleep. You’d given him your bed and set up your own small bedroll on the floor each night, as far away from him as possible to give the illusion of decency. There wasn’t enough distance in the world to make this an appropriate arrangement, but it wasn’t as if there was anyone else around to bear witness. Besides, you’d aged out of the marriage market a long time ago. You didn’t have much of a feminine reputation to protect.

You sat your baskets down and collapsed in the chair across from him. Your body was exhausted, but your mind was still deliriously alert. After a night of nonstop work, the familiar sights and sounds of home should've been enough to settle your thoughts, but Ghost’s presence had you feeling even more jittery, like he was another problem you’d been called upon to solve.

The last person you’d sat at this table with was your brother, before you’d sent him away to live by the sea. You’d tossed berries for him to catch in his open mouth, taught him how to grind herbs with your pestle, arm-wrestled him until he’d grown strong enough to defeat you. And now you were sharing the very same space with a knight. One who choked you, kept his identity a secret, and addressed you as girl instead of woman or midwife or any other decent moniker. Your situation had become so ridiculous that it was almost funny.

“It was my favorite kind of delivery,” you said, even though he hadn’t asked. “Simple, with no injuries. The baby took her time coming out, but she and her mother both ended up healthy and well.”

He said nothing, just like you'd predicted. You folded your arms on the tabletop and rested your head atop them. It was less than comfortable; your back was sore from travel, and your dress reeked of blood and honey, the latter of which you’d slathered on the mother’s skin to cleanse her after delivery. You desperately needed to wash, but the mere prospect of drawing water had your limbs aching in protest.

“What’s your least favorite?” 

You picked your head back up. While Ghost’s mannerisms were nothing short of impossible to understand, his words were much easier—he was either gruff or goading, only bothering to speak to you out of necessity. But this question of his was wholly unnecessary, bizarrely sounding like genuine interest. You mulled over your response, wondering if you should lie, spout something silly or charming. You were a poor liar, though, and he didn’t seem like he had the temperament for silliness or the willingness to be charmed.

“When only the mother dies,” you said.

He blinked at you once, twice. His lashes were pale like butter. “Not the child?”

“They don't—a baby has nothing to lose.” The sleep deprivation was jumbling the words in your brain, but you didn’t want to stop talking, not when you'd finally gotten him to start. You rubbed your eyes, cringing at the scent of copper clinging to your hands. “But a mother has so much—I mean, if she dies, there’s a lot more she’ll be leaving behind.”

This was a soldier, you reminded yourself. A man who fought and killed other men in battle. You didn’t have to explain the weight of death to him. 

“You’re dark,” Ghost groused, as if he was any better. “Thought midwives were supposed to be…”

“Be what?”

His eyes narrowed at your prodding. You shrunk back on instinct, then firmly squared your shoulders. If your poor manners or contrarian beliefs truly affronted him, you’re sure he would’ve punished you by now. He was a dog with blunt teeth, you thought, all bark and no bite, until you remembered the sword by your bed and the yellowing bruises on your neck.

“Tender,” he said finally.

“I can be tender!”

He exhaled. “Prove it.”

You pushed yourself forward, leaning in until your legs jostled his beneath the table. Entirely improper, just like the rest of your behavior, like the rest of your life. Ghost's form had become more visible as the sun rose, the light muted by the cloudy overcast, but still bright enough to reveal how easily he dwarfed the chair. His large hands rested on his large knees, the skin of them crisscrossed with large, faded scars.

“My good Sir,” you said, pouring as much sweetness into your voice as you could muster. You sounded more crazed than kind—you didn’t talk like this often, and by often you meant ever. “Please allow me to express my utmost gratitude for your service. Thank you for protecting our beautiful Kingdom. May I serve you breakfast?”

“Stop that,” Ghost immediately said. “Stick to being rude.”

You couldn’t help but laugh. 

Closing your laptop with a groan, you throw on a hoodie and grab your dwindling pack of cigarettes and head for the door. The night air was cool against your bare legs, but it was bearable as you made your trek. With each step, your mind wandered back to Bradshaw, hoping that you might encounter him tonight. It would ease the pit of anxiety that has lingered in your belly since last night, as much as you hate to admit.

The bench was empty when you got there, but you didn’t see any of his fresh butts in the ashtray.

So there was still hope.

Taking your usual spot, you light your cigarette with a sigh. You let the sounds of the wilderness distract you, blocking out the noise of distant sirens and honking cars. It has been harder to clear your thoughts these days, seemingly trapped between anxiety from your job and denial about your growing feelings for your masked neighbor. Bradshaw had become a comfort to you; his presence was far more meaningful than you should have ever allowed. During the nights when you wanted to cry in frustration, he was there with his snide comments, easing the pressure on your mind. Or on the nights you couldn’t sleep with a racing mind, eagerly listening to you ramble about something irrelevant.

He was so oblivious to it— the impact he has on you. How your smile shifted when you saw him, or how you’ve slowly closed the distance between you on the bench. Yet, he seemed immune to your subtle hints, as if he missed them altogether. Though even with his tough exterior, you managed to find his softer bits hidden underneath.

His tenderness was not lost on you, and you knew it was a rare thing for him. The callouses on his hands, the scars on his body, and the rigid way he carried himself told you so. Bradshaw was a man of calculation, keen on everything around him.

Except for the obvious girl longing to know him.

“Rough day?”

“Jesus fucking Christ!” You cursed as you jumped, pulled to reality by the very man you had been thinking about. “You scared the hell out of me,” you scowled playfully as he took his spot beside you.

“S’not my fault you're so jumpy. Really should pay more attention,” he scolded as he pulled out his pack.

You watched as he tugged up his mask and placed a cigarette between his lips, lighting it with a practiced motion. Bradshaw was right; you should be far more aware of your surroundings. But you didn’t even hear him approach— his massive, hulking, six-foot-something ass.

How the fuck?

You narrow your eyes at him, drawing from your cigarette before leaning closer to him. “Okay, your new nickname is twinkletoes because you must have fucking tiptoed over here.”

“Vetoed,” he grunted, taking a puff. “And I didn’t sneak up on you, you were sittin’ here daydreamin’.”

“But it’s nighttime,” you say with a smirk, knowing he was right once again, but you couldn’t help but be a smart ass.

“Shut up, brat,” he rolled his eyes as his lips quirked upwards.

You were glad to see he was acting as if last night hadn’t happened, which made things much easier for you. Though you had to make notes to avoid being selfish, reminding yourself to take only what he gives and not dig for more. That was your nature, to pry and assess, but that would only push him away. So for the moment, you let yourself soak in the comfort of his presence, the tightness at the base of your neck finally untangling. You slouched on the bench, your smile slipping into something less forced. The rhythm of his breathing, the hiss of his cigarette, the subtle shift of weight as he leaned back— all of it soothed the nerves that had been twisting your gut since the other night.

“Rough day?” Bradshaw asked again abruptly, his voice an edgy gravel.

You hesitated before responding. The image of Bradshaw fleeing the pub flickered in your mind. The doubt you felt resurfaced like a flood, causing your throat to dry. You shielded your eyes from his gaze, taking a careful drag of your cigarette. “Yeah,” you said, trying to sound nonchalant. “Working with a hangover isn’t for the weak.” Lie. You risked a look at him, gauging for a reaction.

He paused for a fraction too long, the filter of his cigarette hovering at his lips. There was a tick of recognition, a ripple of guilt, gone as quickly as it came. “You’re still young,” he grunted, the words coming off as a challenge. “You can handle it.”

You snorted and flicked ash to the ground, playing along as your eyes flitted to him. “How old do you think I am, exactly?”

He eyed you heavily, and you felt the weight of it, the way he took inventory of your face. Lord knows what he made of it all: your smudged mascara, dark circles under your eyes, and a heat that was surely visible as it crept up your neck. “Ain’t it rude to ask a lady her age?” He finally said in retreat.

You rolled your eyes with a smirk. “Technically, I asked you to guess, so that rule doesn’t apply.” Bradshaw tsked as you took a drag, once again not playing into your game. So you decided to push it, leaning in close with a sly smile. “Well, what about you, Bradshaw? How old are you?”

He scoffed, though he didn’t move away. “Old enough to know better.” His eyes met yours at that, and you immediately knew he was referring to more than just hangovers. You wish he would say it, admit that he felt something towards you—towards this— so you can stop feeling the pain of it being one-sided. However, you know that would never come. “But even old dogs have their tricks.” He finally said after a brief pause.

You made a point of studying him in return, the flex of his biceps as he moved to smoke, the twitch of his jaw under dark stubble, and how his hand dwarfed his cigarette. “Oh, you got tricks?” You teased lightly, nudging his knee with yours.

His eyes darted to where your legs brushed, then back to your face, unreadable through the darkness and the mask. “More than you know,” he grunted quietly, looking away, as if confessing to the night rather than to you.

Bradshaw’s mood wasn’t somber— it was something else, something you just couldn’t place. You let the moment hang, the sounds of the city hitting in distant waves. “What about you?” You asked, wanting to keep him here, to draw out something real. “Smoking for fun or cause you need it?”

There was another long pause, his fingers squeezing his cigarette before he drew from it. “Needed to clear my head,” he answered, but you could hear what’s hidden behind it, the careful way he censored his words. “Been smoking more lately. Noticed?”

You tried not to let your delight show, but you did— you did notice. You’d noticed the chain-smoking, the extra butts in the tray, the extended visits at the pergola with you. It was a detail you’d tucked away, but the admission was a gift. Initially, it was a delusional thought that you often drifted off to, hoping that he enjoyed the company as much as you.

“Didn’t take you for a stress smoker,” you managed, trying to keep it light. “What’s got you so wound up? Did something happen?” You guessed with gentle enthusiasm. “Or are you bored?”

He shrugged again, more evasively. “Somethin’ like that.”

You pressed, leaning in close enough to smell the faint hint of his cologne beneath the smoke. “Oh, come on, Bradshaw! Give me something here! Is it work, or…?”

He narrowed his eyes at you, then grunted in defeat when you didn’t falter. “Don’t ‘ave much of a life outside work.”

You grinned, ashing your cigarette with an elegant flick and fluttering your lashes. “You sure about that?”

Bradshaw rolled his eyes with exaggerated patience. “Not this again.”

You pressed your advantage, giving him your best innocent doe eyes. “You’re the one who said you were smoking more. That’s, like, a classic sign of something. So what is it? Trouble at work? Family drama? Secret lover?”

That got the reaction you’d hoped for. He snorted and rolled his eyes, his shoulders shaking lightly with suppressed laughter. “Don’t have time for that shite,” he said, shaking his head.

You tilted your head, feigning a casual study of the night while you watched the way his hands toyed with the filter from the corner of your eyes. You let the silence draw out, filled only by the hum of distant roads and the chorus of insects. It felt like a standoff, you both waiting to see where the other will direct the conversation. You wondered if he sensed the trap you were laying, if he’d even bother to sidestep it.

“Come on,” you said quietly, nudging his thigh with your knee again, the action feeling familiar. “I’m serious. Something’s got you on edge. It’s not just work, is it?” You kept your voice low, careful not to spook the beast you were coaxing closer. “You’re not the only one who notices things, you know.”

Bradshaw grunted, but the movement of his jaw betrayed him— something about the flick in his eyes, the way he kept his shoulder squared toward you, as if braced for a blow. “Life’s not always simple,” he replied with a gruff voice. “Sometimes you just want the world to shut up for five fuckin’ minutes.”

“Oh,” you deadpanned. Every nerve in you recoiled. Had you read him wrong? He came here for peace and quiet, yet here you are, always running your mouth like a toddler that just learned to speak. All this time, has he—

“But there’s this… Yank. Smokes too much. Bit of a pain in my arse. Won’t stop talkin’.” You watched him breathlessly, your heart hammering in your chest, butterflies gathering in your stomach as you hung on to his words. “For some reason, I like her nonsense. Don’t mind her yappin’.”

Your heart thrummed so loud you were sure he could hear it. Your brain had flipped on itself, a wild mix of excitement and adrenaline running through you at his confession. You blinked, playing along with a demure look, leaning closer to him. “She sounds like trouble.”

“She is,” he said, almost fondly, and it nearly took your breath from your lungs.

You tilted your head, letting your hair fall to one side, and tried to mask the stupid smile that threatened to break through. “You should probably avoid her then,” you mused, adding a dramatic sigh. “Bad influences, you know.”

He made a noise low in his throat as he leaned in slightly towards you. “You’re fuckin’ daft,” he murmured, but there was no heat to it. If anything, it was affectionate. “Not sure if I’m tryin’ to avoid her, or the opposite.”

You let yourself lean into him, shoulder brushing his, and when he didn’t stiffen or pull away, you felt something warm bloom in your chest. He just let you settle there.“Maybe don’t avoid her,” you said quietly. “She might like smoking with you.” The admission came easily, and when you felt him relax against you, you couldn’t help the smile pull that pulled at your lips.

“Is that right?” He warmly huffed as he looked down at you, leaning against his arm.

You reached for another cigarette and let him light it for you, his hand cupped around the flame, knuckles dusted with old scars. The heat of his palm hovered close, the smell of lighter fluid flaring sharply, and you just looked at him, marveled for a second at the care he took in a gesture so simple. He sparked his own cigarette after, the two of you submerged in a cloud of fresh smoke.

This had felt like an admission, the two of you side-by-side and sharing the quiet.

You almost wrecked it with a joke, the impulse to deflect so deeply ingrained, but you held back. There was something new in the air, a subtle shift. Not quite an escalation, but a loosening, a give in the line of his shoulders, a softness you dared not name.

After a long spell of easy silence, Bradshaw finally broke it. “How’s the new job treatin’ ya, really?”

The question caught you off-guard. He’d never pressed before, always content to let you volunteer what you would, skirting the details as you saw fit. You fumbled for an answer, lips parting around the truth you could never fully own. What would he say if you told him everything? If he saw past the sales manager mask to the real sleepless girl beneath, to the woman who lied for a living because it was the only way she knew how to survive?

“Transition’s been rougher than I thought it would be,” you admitted, curling your knees up and letting them brush his thigh. “There’s—” you hesitated again, reluctant to name it, “a better way to do things, but management wants it done their way. They want results, but won’t let me do the thing I’m good at to get them.” It wasn’t a lie, but it was as close to the truth as you could get.

Bradshaw nodded, the gesture coming from experience. “Sounds ‘bout right,” he said, voice dry and understanding. “Bosses are the fuckin’ worst.”

You glanced over, searching for the sarcasm but finding only subtle support. “Don’t suppose you can relate?” You prompted, testing the waters once again.

He grunted as his eyes moved forward to the parking lot. “Spent most my life with someone else tellin’ me how to do my job. You get used to it, or you don’t.”

You wanted to ask if he got used to it, but you had a feeling you already knew.

“So what about you?” You prodded softly. “How’s work for you? I’ve seen you around more lately.”

Bradshaw rolled the cigarette between his fingers, the orange tip crinkling and flattening. “Boring,” he said, but it sounded like a lie, or at least a strategic misrepresentation. “But that’s how I like it. Peace and quiet, no one to answer to. S’why I come out here. S’why I don’t talk to many people.”

Except me.

You let that sit, the unsaid things crowding into the empty spaces between words. “You ever get lonely?” You asked, the question pressing hard against your heart.

He blinked at you slowly as if weighing whether to be honest. You stared at him intently, begging for the truth with your eyes. “Sometimes,” he said at last, the admission falling from his lips. “But it’s better than the alternative.”

Now there’s a dark sentiment you recognize, one you’ve driven into yourself many times.

You didn’t press him further, not tonight. Bradshaw didn’t have to say the words for you to grasp the meaning. You just reached over and let your hand rest lightly on his knee, the weight of it meant to anchor, not to trap.

To show him you are here.

“You’re not alone, you know,” you said, words spilling out before you could check them. “At least not when you’re with me.” There was a tremor in your voice, but you steadied it with a crooked little smirk. “Unless you hate my guts, in which case I get it, but—”

His hand covered yours, rough and warm and so careful you almost forgot to breathe. He squeezed, just once, then let go, but the echo of his touch lingered. “Don’t hate you,” he muttered as he met your eyes.

You swallowed, heart suddenly racing, feeling the way his eyes bore into you with a new light. You wondered if he was seeing you, the real you, or just the outline you offered. Maybe it didn’t matter what he saw.

Maybe this was enough.

“Good,” you said quietly, feeling like you sound stupid. “Because I don’t hate you either.”

Bradshaw cleared his throat, the rough catch of it betraying something soft underneath. “Bit of a nuisance, though, aren’t you?” The insult landed more like gratitude.

You squeezed his knee gently before letting your hand drift away, back into the neutral territory between you. “Lucky for you, I’m stubborn,” you replied, voice lighter and more controlled now.

You both snorted at the same time, and the familiar rhythm of your banter stitched the moment back together. He made a remark about your nicotine dependency and you countered about his weirdly endearing inability to take a compliment, and just like that, the world felt more like a place you could stand to exist in.

You smoked in comfortable silence until your cigarettes burned down to nubs, both of you stalling on the last drags, reluctant to break the spell. When you finally stubbed yours out, you nudged him with your shoulder. “You gonna be okay, Bradshaw?” You asked, only half-joking.

He side-eyed you, mouth quirked. “S’pose so.”

You paused as you stood, your body reluctant to leave the warm gravity of his orbit. There was a catch in your chest, things you wanted to say but didn’t have the words for. Your mind was muddled with trailing thoughts, each one a dizzying layer about Bradshaw.

Instead, you just smiled and gave him a lazy salute. “See ya around, old man.”

Bradshaw grunted, but there was a warmth in it. “Don’t stay up too late, Yank.”

“Night, Bradshaw.” You winked before finally making your move back home.

He nodded once, and you thought you saw the edge of a smile, though it was quickly covered as he pulled down his mask.

You walked back to your apartment with a spring in your step, lighter than you’d felt in days. At the door, you dared a glance back to the pergola. He was still there, a massive silhouette in the dark, watching the world— or was he watching you?

Price negotiates the way Price does everything. Measured and relentless, giving nothing away. He talks numbers and quantities. Ammunition calibres. Expiration dates on the antibiotics, because Holt tried to pass off expired tetracycline last time and Price has a memory like a fucking filing cabinet. And Fletcher hovers at the edge of the conversation, pencil scratching, confirming numbers with small nods when Holt glances his way.

The bookkeeper and the captain speak the same language—logistics, inventory, the mathematics of survival—and there's a moment, brief and strange, where Price and Fletcher lock eyes over a supply count and something passes between them that looks almost like professional respect.

But that brief flicker dies at once when Fletcher's gaze drifts back to you.

Holt half-listens. He drinks instead and interrupts to tell stories nobody asked for—about a raid on a convoy last month, about improvements to Ashworth's walls, about the expansion of the patrol zone. He tells these stories with his hand on you. Always on you.

You sit on the arm of the sofa for the first twenty minutes. Then Holt pulls you onto the sofa proper, tucked against his side with his arm heavy across your shoulders. Then, when he gets drunker, onto his lap. His hand rests on your thigh. Moves to your waist, then your hip, all while the leather collar sits snug against your throat and the leash trails across the sofa cushions like a dead snake.

You pour drinks when told. You sit when told. You shift position when his hands reposition you—a living doll being arranged by a child who hasn't learned that other humans have feelings, too.

At one point, Holt's talking about fuel reserves and his fingers drift up to your jaw, tilting your face toward the light so Price can see you in profile—the line of your nose, the shape of your mouth, the sweep of your lashes—like he's remembered mid-sentence that he has a beautiful thing and wants to make sure everyone else remembers too.

"Look at that bone structure," he says to Price, as if Price asked. "Proper breed, that is. Continental, I think."

And Price says, "Thirty boxes of 5.56, Dean. Not twenty."

Fletcher writes the number down without being asked. His eyes stay on you for two seconds longer than the notation requires, Adam’s apple bobbing as he swallows.

Forty minutes into the negotiation, the back door bangs open.

Danny comes through first, dragging a man by the collar of his jacket—a thin man, outskirts-thin, all sharp angles and bad skin, mid-thirties maybe but looking fifty. Behind them, two more of Holt's enforcers, and between them a woman. Younger. Perhaps the man's wife, maybe his daughter—it's hard to tell in a world that ages people past recognition. She's crying. Not loudly. The quiet, hitching sobs of someone who's learned that loud crying gets you hit.

Holt doesn't stand, but he shifts you off his lap and onto the armrest—a repositioning, like moving a drink to make room on the table—and leans forward.

He makes a vague hand gesture. "What's this then?"

"Grayson." Danny shoves the man to his knees. The sound of bone hitting concrete is sharp and wet. "Caught the fucker hoardin’. Three tins of peaches, a bottle of iodine, and a blanket he didn't declare."

Three tins of peaches. A bottle of iodine. A blanket. In the world before, it would be but a strange shopping bag. Here, it's a capital offence.

Holt looks at the man on his knees. The grin doesn't change—it never changes—but something behind it recalibrates. The showman is still there, but underneath it the machine is working. Always calculating.

"Grayson." He says the name like he's tasting it. "You're on Fletcher's east block, yeah? Plot twelve?"

Fletcher is checking his ledger already. "Plot twelve. Family of three. Ration tier two. He's a scavenger—runs with Vincent's crew on the A40 route."

"Scavenger." Holt nods slowly, drags his teeth over his bottom lip. "So you find things. That's your job. You find things and you bring them back here and they go into the supply, and Fletcher counts them, and then your family gets fed. That's how it works, aye? That's the arrangement?"

Grayson doesn't answer. He's shaking; hands flat on the concrete, fingers spread, and he's shaking the way people shake when the adrenaline has gone past useful and into the territory where the body starts to betray itself.

"Three tins," Holt repeats. He's speaking to the room now. To his men, to the 141, to you—to everyone, because the audience is the point. "Three tins of peaches, an iodine bottle, and a blanket. Now, I'm a reasonable man. Ask anyone. I'm fucking reasonable," he looks at Danny directly, open his arms demonstratively, "Am I not reasonable, Danny?"

Danny rolls his buff shoulders, nods. "Aye, fuckin’ reasonable, boss."

Holt looks pleased, continues, "But if everyone takes three tins, Grayson—if everyone just fucking decides the rules don't apply to them—then the supply breaks down. And if the supply breaks down, people starve. And if people starve, they get desperate. And desperate people do stupid things. And I fucking hate stupidity. So, you see, Grayson, this isn't about peaches. This is about fucking order."

He says order the way Price says the calculation. The same weight. The same conviction. The same willingness to let the word carry the violence so the speaker doesn't have to.

"Danny," Holt says, almost disappointed, and pinches the bridge of his nose for effect.

Danny steps forward. He doesn't ask what. He knows what.

The first hit is open-handed—a slap that cracks across the kneeling man's face and sends his head snapping sideways. The second is a fist. The third breaks something; the sound is specific, a crunch that's either cartilage or bone, and blood sprays across the concrete in a pattern that Gaz will see when he closes his eyes tonight.

The woman screams. One of the enforcers clamps a beefy hand over her mouth.

Grayson doesn't scream. He takes it the way people take things in Ashworth—silently, on his knees, because screaming makes it worse and silence might, might, might make it stop sooner.

It doesn't stop sooner.

Danny works him over with the methodical efficiency of a man who does this regularly enough that it's become administrative. Face, ribs, kidneys. Not enough to kill—Holt doesn't waste labour—but enough to make a point that the outskirts will be discussing for weeks. Enough that Grayson will piss blood for days and flinch at sudden movements for months and never, ever keep a tin of peaches again.

Holt watches casually with his drink in his hand which you handed him unprompted. He glances at you once—a quick check, the way an owner checks a dog's reaction to thunder. You're staring straight ahead again, face blank, breathing steady. You've seen this before. The blankness isn't shock. It's Tuesday.

He glances at the 141.

Price hasn't moved. His expression hasn't changed. He's watching the beating the way he watches everything. Absorbing and filing it, giving nothing away. But his hand, resting on his thigh, has closed into a fist so tight the knuckles are white under the glove.

Soap has stopped breathing. He's standing by the door, and he's stopped breathing and the zippo is in his hand and his thumb is on the lid and he's pressing so hard the metal is cutting into his bare skin.

Gaz is looking at the woman. At the hand over her mouth. At the tears running over the enforcer's fingers. His dark eyes are very bright and very still and his floss stick has fallen from his mouth atop his tac vest and he hasn't noticed yet.

Ghost is looking at Holt.

Not at the beating. At Holt. At the man watching the beating with his drink and his grin and his casual cruelty. Who, for a split second, reminded him of his own dead father, and something behind Ghost's balaclava is doing the kind of mathematics that doesn't involve supply counts.

"Right," Holt concludes, after maybe two minutes that feel like twenty. "That'll do."

Danny steps back. His knuckles are split. He flexes his hand, wipes it on his trousers, spits on the floor, right next to the man he just beat. And Grayson is on the concrete, curled into himself, breathing in wet, ragged gasps. Blood pools under his face. The woman is released; she drops to her knees beside him, hands hovering, afraid to touch because touching might make it worse, not touching might make it worse, everything in this place is a calculation about what makes things worse.

"Get him to Briggs," Holt orders eventually. "And dock his family's rations for a month. Tier three."

Fletcher nods, makes a note. His handwriting doesn't waver.

Two of Holt's men drag Grayson out. The woman follows, stumbling. The door closes. The blood stays on the floor.

Holt turns back to Price and smiles like nothing happened.

"Now. Where were we? Thirty boxes of 5.56?"

The trade goes on and completes in silence.

Price counts every box. Checks every seal. Opens two at random. His movements are precise, mechanical, the discipline holding him upright the way rebar holds concrete. Fletcher shadows him with the ledger, ticking off items, and neither man speaks beyond the numbers.

Holt's men load the crates into the truck. The October light is fading—half three and already the shadows are stretching, the amber going grey. The temperature's dropping. Winter breathing down the valley.

Holt appears in the doorway, leather jacket on, your leash wrapped around his good hand. You stand beside him in the black dress and heels, arranged and still, the collar catching the last of the natural light in the room.

"Right then," Holt says, rubbing his hands together like a man proposing a night out. "You lot aren't driving back in the dark. Not with the bloody roads like they are and the fast ones getting bolder. Stay the night. I insist."

"We'll manage," Price says.

"Don't be daft, John. It's an hour's drive in daylight and you'd be doing it in the dark. I've got rooms. Proper rooms, beds, and walls that don't let the wind in. Hot water, even, if the boiler's behaving." He's already walking, the leash pulling you into step beside him, and there is something in the way he moves—expansive, proprietary, a man giving a tour of his estate—that makes it clear this isn't a suggestion. "Come on. Let me show you what Ashworth has to offer after dark."

Price looks at Soap. Soap looks at Gaz. Gaz looks at Ghost. Ghost looks at the back of Holt’s bald head, like he’s locked on a target.

"One drink," Price agrees. "Then we leave."

Holt walks them through the core and it’s different after dark.

The generators power strings of bare bulbs along the main corridors between buildings, casting everything in a harsh, yellow-white glare that makes the shadows sharper. People move between the structures—Holt's inner circle, the privileged three hundred, going about the business of evening in a settlement that has electricity and order and a man at the top who ensures both through spectacle and pain. There's music from somewhere, tinny and distorted. A speaker running off a car battery playing something that might have been pop once. Laughter. The clink of bottles.

Holt leads them through it like an excited tour guide. The leash is casual in his hand, and you walk beside him on those heels with the practiced gait of someone who has learned to match his pace exactly, to anticipate the turns, to be led without appearing to be dragged. Your face gives nothing away. Your eyes give nothing away. You are a woman walking through a settlement on a leash, and you have made this walk so many times that your body does it without consulting the rest of you.

They pass a building that's louder than the others. Warmer light spills from the windows—not the harsh white of the bulbs but something softer, redder. The music is coming from here. And the laughter. And something else—a low, heavy sweetness in the air that both Gaz and Ghost identify before they see the source.

Weed.

The smell is unmistakable and absurd. Somewhere in Ashworth—somewhere in a settlement where the outskirts children are malnourished and the medicine supply runs on expired antibiotics and people are beaten half to death for three tins of peaches—someone is growing cannabis. Enough of it that the smell saturates the air around this building like weather and manages to drown out the stench coming from The Pit. No skill for potatoes. No resources for agriculture that would actually feed two thousand people. But plenty for this.

"The Lounge," Holt announces, like he's unveiling an exclusive restaurant. "Best spot in Ashworth! My gift to the lads. A man works hard, a man deserves to relax. Don't you think, Price?"

He pushes the door open without waiting for an answer that wouldn't come anyway.

The interior is warm and dim and thick with smoke. Red-tinted light from fabric draped over the bulbs. Mattresses on the floor, some with sheets, some without. Relatively clean in comparison to the rest of everything outside the inner circle. A bar with actual bottles, actual glasses, and someone pouring drinks. Music, louder inside. And women.

A dozen, maybe more. Some on the mattresses, some at the bar, some standing in doorways that lead to back rooms. They're dressed the way you're dressed—or less. Clothes from the before, scavenged and maintained. Short dresses, lingerie, heels. Clean. Made-up, some of them, with cosmetics hoarded or traded for at prices that don't bear thinking about. They move through the smoke with a looseness that's chemical rather than comfortable, a languor in the limbs that says the weed isn't the only thing being distributed around here. Their eyes are glassy with the soft focus of women who've been given something to make the work easier to perform, or easier to forget.

Some of them are not women.

Soap sees it first because Soap looks at faces, and the face nearest the door belongs to a girl.

She's sitting on a mattress with her knees drawn up, wearing an oversized T-shirt that slides off one bony shoulder, and her face is young. Not young the way people use the word casually. Young. Fifteen. Sixteen at the outside. The soft unfinished quality of a jaw that hasn't fully set, the wide eyes of someone who hasn't learned to narrow them yet.

She's smoking a joint with the practised ease of someone who's been given joints regularly and recently, and she looks up at the 141 as they pass and smiles—a trained smile, an offering—and Soap's zippo stops dead in his hand.

There are others. Mixed in with the older women—the ones in their twenties and thirties who might have chosen this or might not, whose consent in a world without alternatives is a question nobody's asking—there are girls who are visibly, obviously, sickeningly young. Teenagers. Dressed the same, drugged the same, positioned the same, abused the same.

The women look at the 141 the way women in places like this look at men; assessing eyes, performing and calculating. Voices call out from the smoke, soft and coaxing, fake giggling.

"Hey, handsome—"

"Come sit down with me, love—"

"You look like you need to relax—"

One of them reaches for Gaz's arm as he passes, and he nearly startles.

Her fingers are thin, the nails bitten to nothing, and she's smiling in a way that doesn't reach her eyes because her eyes are somewhere else entirely—the same somewhere that yours go when Holt's hands are on you. Gaz steps sideways out of reach, and the woman's hand drops and her smile flickers and for a moment she looks confused, like a machine that's received an input it wasn't programmed for.

They look at you too. The women around here.

They look at you on Holt's leash in your black dress and heels, clean and kept and collared, and the looks are not kind. Resentment. Envy, maybe, though the word feels wrong when applied to a woman in a collar being paraded by a warlord. You're Holt's private stock. You sleep in an actual bed. You eat regularly. You have one man to endure instead of however many walk through that door on a given night.

In the economy of Ashworth's brutality, you have it good, and the women in this room know it, and they hate you for it in the way that trapped people hate anyone whose trap looks slightly more comfortable than theirs.

You don't see them. Or you do, but you've built the wall so high that what's on the other side of your eyes isn't processing the information. You walk through the smoke and the red light and the sounds of Ashworth's entertainment district with the blank, practised stride of a woman who is not here, has never been here, will not remember being here, because remembering would require acknowledging that this is the world now and that acknowledgement would crack something she can't afford to crack.

Holt is watching the 141 with the bright-eyed interest of a man running an experiment.

"Go on, then," he urges. "Pick one. On the house. Consider it a trade bonus." He tugs your leash, pulling you closer, his arm going around your waist, then his hand wanders more boldly, getting in a mood. "Not this one, obviously. This one's mine. But anything else you see—"

"We're fine," Price says.

His voice is level. Perfectly controlled. The voice of a man who's been trained to negotiate hostage situations and arms deals and the surrender terms of enemy combatants, all of which are less difficult than standing in a room full of drugged women and teenage girls and saying we're fine without reaching for his sidearm.

"Come on, Price. Live a little. Your Scottish lad looks tense." Holt nods at Soap, who is standing very still and staring at nothing with an expression that could be boredom if you didn't know what boredom looked like on Soap, and this isn't it. This is the opposite. This is a man containing something that would clear the room in a heartbeat if he let it out. "A night with one of these girls would sort him right out."

Girls.

Holt says it without flinching. Without irony nor shame. Without any indication that the word means something different than women and that the difference matters.

"We appreciate the hospitality," Price continues, and the word hospitality comes out of his mouth with a flatness that could cut glass, "but we've got a drive ahead. Early start."

Holt studies him. The grin is still there but something behind it is working, recalculating and adjusting. He looks at the four of them, standing in a row in this room full of smoke and abused flesh and red light, and not one of them has looked at a woman with anything other than the careful blankness of men trying very hard not to react to what they're seeing.

"Four men," Holt says, shaking his head. "Four fit, healthy blokes, and not one of you wants a go." He pulls you against his side, his hand finding your hip, the gesture simultaneously possessive and dismissive. "It's not natural, innit? Makes a man think you lot are hiding something."

"The only thing we're hiding is a schedule," Price counters. "The drink, Dean. Then we are leaving."

Holt holds the moment. Then the grin widens—the showman resurfacing, the experiment concluded, the data filed away.

"One drink." He nods once. "Let me make it a good one."

They have the drink at the bar in the Lounge, standing, not sitting, because sitting would mean staying. Price drinks water from a glass he watches being poured. Gaz doesn't drink at all. Soap takes a vodka and holds it without lifting it to his mouth, his hand white around the glass.

Ghost doesn't take anything. He stands at the edge of the group with his arms crossed and his eyes moving—the women, the doors, the back rooms, the girls—and his jaw under the balaclava is doing something that isn't clenching because clenching would be a tell, and Ghost doesn't give tells.

It's five minutes but feels like a fucking year.

They leave. Holt walks them back to the truck, you on the leash beside him, the October cold biting after the warmth of the Lounge. Goosebumps pebble on your skin and Holt rubs his hands along your arms to warm you up. To any outsider, it might look like he cares.

The stars are out—more stars than anyone saw before the collapse; the light pollution gone, the Milky Way visible in a way that would be beautiful if everything underneath it wasn't so ugly.

"Pleasure as always, Captain!" Holt calls as Price climbs into the truck, still rubbing and touching you. "Don't be a stranger, aye? And think about what I said—strength in numbers!"

He lifts the leash. Your arm rises with it in a wave, like a puppet on a string.

You're being led back toward the main building with Holt’s good hand groping your ass when you glance over your shoulder. One look. Half a second. And you make eye contact with Ghost across thirty metres of mud and dark and the distant glow of the burn pit.

Your face is composed. Blank. Perfect.

But your eyes.

Your eyes scream Help.

Ghost holds the look for one beat. Two. Then he gets in the truck and pulls the door shut.

Nobody speaks for seven miles.

The road unspools. The headlights cut through darkness that is total and absolute—no streetlights, no house lights, no light pollution, just the beams and the tarmac and the hedgerows pressing in on either side. A rotten shambler stands in a field to the left, two hundred metres out, swaying in the wind. It doesn't react. Too far, too slow. Just a shape in the dark. A biological process continuing past the point of meaning.

No one wastes a bullet on it tonight.

It’s Gaz who breaks first. His voice comes from the back seat, raw and tight.

"Price."

"Kyle."

"Those girls—"

"I know."

"Some of them were—"

"I know, Kyle."

Silence. 27 seconds of it.

"We can't leave her there."

"We can," Price objects flatly, adjusting his grip on the steering wheel. "And we did."

"That's not what I—" Gaz stops. When he speaks again, the London is gone from his voice. What is left is something younger and more exposed, the voice of a man whose moral framework has just been hit by something it wasn't built to absorb. "We walked through a brothel full of drugged teenagers, Captain. We watched a man get beaten half to death for three tins of peaches. We sat in a room while a woman in a collar poured us vodka… And we're driving home."

"What's the alternative?"

"I don't know. But this isn't—"

"The alternative is we start a war. With a settlement of two thousand people. With no supply line, no backup, no exfil, and winter coming." Price's hands are tight on the wheel now. "We're four men, Kyle. Four. We don't get to fix the world. We barely get to fix the bloody fence."

Soap speaks without turning from the window.

"He killed her dog."

Nobody responds. Everyone knows Soap doesn't even like dogs, yet the sentence sits in the cab like something with weight and temperature.

"She's mapping the room." His voice is low. Rough like a rake on gravel. The flat Manchester in it like concrete.

Price glances in the rearview, surprised. "What?"

"Her eyes." Ghost taps one gloved finger against the corner of his right eye for emphasis. "Every time Holt wasn't lookin’ at her, she was cataloguing. Exits, weapons, guard positions." A pause. "She ain’t bloody broken. She's waitin’ for an opportunity she can't create on her own."

"Rope burns on her wrists," he continues, his tone unchanged—flat, clinical, a debrief rather than a plea. "Old ones underneath newer ones. She's tried before. At least twice. He keeps tying her up ‘cause she keeps tryin’."

Soap turns in his seat. His blue eyes are sharp and wide.

"So she's a fighter."

"She's a survivor. There's a difference." Ghost looks at Price in the rearview mirror and holds. "She had a farmhouse, a weapon, and a working knowledge of field medicine and botany. Alone. For however bloody long before Holt's men found ‘er. That's not a civilian, Captain. That's an asset."

The word is deliberate. Asset. The word that translates we should help her into something Price's operational brain can process without the emotional overhead.

The captain says nothing for a long time. The road unspools. Dead traffic lights swing in the wind.

"We don't do rescue missions," he says eventually, cutting through the tense silence. But he says it like a man testing the weight of something. Checking for cracks.

"No," Ghost agrees. "We don't."

Nothing else is said, but Price takes the long way home, and when they pass the junction that leads toward Ross-on-Wye—toward a ruined farmhouse where a woman once lived with a dog and a shotgun—he slows. Just for a moment.

Then he drives on.

The safehouse is dark when they arrive.

Soap is out of the truck before it fully stops and begins unloading the crates alone. He doesn't ask for help, and nobody offers because they know that Johnny needs the weight right now. Needs his hands full and his muscles burning and the physical reality of ammunition boxes and antibiotic cases to anchor him inside his own body, because what's happening inside his head is a room full of red light and smoke and a girl with a joint and a trained smile who couldn't have been older than fifteen.

He stacks the crates. He checks the perimeter wire. He resets the tripwires on the south approach. He does all of it in the dark, by touch, because the dark is better right now. The dark doesn't have faces in it.

Ghost goes upstairs. The door closes behind him.

Gaz sits on the porch with his rifle across his knees and his head in his hands and stays there for a long time.

Price makes tea and holds onto his routine.

Or tries to. He fills the kettle. Lights the burner. Sets it on the flame. Stands there with his hands braced on the counter and watches the water heat through the glass. The cigar sits beside him, unlit. He doesn't reach for it.

The kettle boils. He pours it. Drops the teabag in—reused, the third or fourth steeping, the water barely tinting brown. He wraps his hands around the mug. Stands there.

At midnight, the map comes out.

Not the old one—Price draws a new one. He sits at the kitchen table with a sheet of paper from the dwindling stationery supply and a pencil stub, and he draws Ashworth from memory. The perimeter wall. The gate. The main building. The generator housing. The brothel. The burn pit.

He's not planning anything, just looking. The way a man looks at a crossword he's told himself he's not going to solve, while his pen hovers over the grid.

Footsteps sound on the stairs. He doesn't look up, knows who it is by weight and rhythm.

Soap drops into the chair across from him. T-shirt and combat trousers, barefoot, hands still dirty from the crates. He smells like cold air, cellar, and gun oil. His eyes flicker to the spread map. Then up at Price.

"Can't sleep?" Price asks conversationally, not looking up.

"He killed her dog." Soap says it like it explains everything. Like it's the thesis statement of a paper he's been writing all day. "She had a dog and a house, and they killed the fuckin’ dog and took everything else."

Price takes a sip of tea that's barely tea. Grimaces.

"Johnny—"

"I'm no’ askin’ ye for a rescue mission." Soap's voice is steady and controlled now. He's had hours to work through the fire and come out the other side into something colder, harder, more useful. "I'm tellin’ ye what Ghost told ye. She's an asset. She knows plants, medicine, mapping. She survived alone. She's not broken. Not yet."

"And extracting her from a compound of two thousand—"

"Is doable." Soap leans forward. His blue eyes are bright in the lamplight. "It's doable, Price. We've done worse. Urzikstan. Al-Mazrah. We've gone into harder places with less intel and come oot clean."

"We had support then. Air support, logistics, exfil routes—"

"We had each other. Same as now."

Price finally looks at him. The lamp casts shadows across the captain's face, deepening the lines, ageing him past forty-eight into something geological. He looks tired—not the tiredness of a single long day, but the cumulative exhaustion of six years plus of impossible choices.

"If we do this," Price says slowly, "and it goes wrong—we lose the Ashworth supply line. Permanently. Holt's not the forgiving type."

"If we don't do this," Soap replies, leaning back in his seat, thick brows furrowing, "what are we?"

Price blinks.

"What are we, Price?" Soap's voice drops. Not angry but quiet. Serious in a way that Soap rarely is, the Glasgow softening into something that's almost gentle.

"Because we've been tellin’ ourselves we're the good ones. We don't take women as payment. We don't use the brothel. We don't trade in people. We come home clean and we tell ourselves that makes us different." His jaw works, he gestures with one hand. "But we just walked through a room full of drugged girls and we didn't do a fuckin’ thing. We watched a man get his face caved in for hidin’ food for his bairns and we didn't do a thing. We sat there while Holt put his hands all over her and we—" He stops. Swallows hard as his temper starts flaring. "We drove home and made tea and told ourselves it's the calculation."

The word lands like a slap.

Price stares at the map.

"She looked at us," Soap says, quieter now. "She looked at Ghost. And we left."

Silence. The farmhouse creaks in the wind. Outside, an owl calls—two notes, low and hollow. The only nightlife left that isn't trying to eat them.

"I need to talk to Simon," Price says.

Soap nods. He doesn't push further. He knows that voice—the voice Price uses when the decision is forming and he's working out the shape of it. The captain's voice. The one that means the pen has touched the grid.

Soap stands. Pushes the chair back. Pauses in the doorway.

"He killed her dog, Price."

"I heard you, son."

"Just makin’ sure."

He leaves, goes upstairs. Price sits alone with the map and the cold tea and the quiet, and his eyes trace the western wall of Ashworth where the corrugated steel is older than the rest, where rain and neglect have had six years to do their work.

He's not planning anything.

But he doesn't fold the map either.

The truck rattles along the A49—or what's left of it. Six years of freeze-thaw and neglect have cracked the tarmac into something closer to mosaic than road; saplings pushing through the gaps in the central reservation, the hard shoulder buried under a tide of dead leaves and grass. Abandoned cars line the route like a museum exhibit, stripped to shells, windows smashed, some burned down to bare metal. A red Royal Mail van sits nose-first in a ditch, its side panel ripped open, the contents long since looted. October light—low, amber, the last of the warmth before November kills it—catches the rust and makes it glow.

Price drives.

He always drives on Ashworth runs. Left hand on the wheel, right hand resting near the gearstick where it can reach his sidearm in under a second. His boonie hat is pulled low, the brim shadowing his eyes. The cigar—half a cigar, really, a dried-out stump he's been nursing for God knows how long—sits unlit between his teeth. He rolls it from one side of his mouth to the other without appearing to notice he's doing it.

The engine in the truck bed is a marine diesel they pulled from a beached trawler on the Severn coast. Three weeks of work with a chain hoist, a come-along, and Soap swearing in combinations that could strip paint. Twelve hundred horsepower, four-stroke, intact. It's the most valuable thing they've traded in two years, and it's going to a man Price would cheerfully put a bullet in if the mathematics allowed it.

The mathematics don't allow it. The mathematics haven't allowed it for three years of trading with Dean Holt, and Price has made his peace with that the way he makes his peace with everything—quietly, totally, with the particular discipline of a man who learned long ago that the mission is more important than how it makes you feel.

"Hate this fuckin' place," Soap announces, breaking the tension, and saying out loud what everyone is thinking.

It's the first thing anyone's said in twenty minutes. His voice breaks the quiet of the cab; that deep, unnatural quiet that six years without traffic or aircraft or the background hum of civilisation has carved into the world. The quiet that drove people insane in the early days. The quiet that still presses against the windows like water pressure, so that every sound inside the truck—the engine, the rattle of the tarp, Soap's voice—feels too loud and exposed.

"Noted," Price says, without looking over. His jaw works around the cigar. "You've mentioned it the last four times."

"Deserves mentionin’ a fifth."

"Keep it to yourself when we're inside." Price glances in the rearview mirror. Gaz and Ghost sit in the back—Gaz on the left, rifle across his knees, chewing on a dental floss stick with the focused intensity of a man performing a religious ritual; Ghost on the right, balaclava on, arms crossed, one boot up on the seat in front of him, utterly still. "All of you. We're in, we negotiate, we're out. Three hours maximum."

"What's he want this time?" Gaz asks. He pulls the floss stick from his mouth, examines it, puts it back. The London in his voice is always closer to the surface before an Ashworth run—the vowels flattening, the consonants sharpening, the code-switching that happens when Kyle Garrick is bracing for something. "Beyond the diesel."

"Don't know. That's what worries me." Price pulls on his gloves—tactical, worn thin at the fingertips, one of a dozen pairs he's maintained since Credenhill. "Holt doesn't call us back early unless he's got something to prove."

Credenhill.

The name sits in the cab like an old bruise. None of them say it often—the SAS base in Hereford where they regrouped after the global deployments failed, where they held the line for eighteen months while the chain of command rotted from the inside, where Price watched the institution he'd served for twenty-five years turn into something he couldn't stomach and made the call to walk.

Four men out the wire in the dark with what they could carry, leaving behind the uniforms and the ranks and the last pretence that someone else was making the decisions.

That was four years ago. They've been independent contractors since—a polite term for survivors who trade skills for supplies and try not to think too hard about who they're trading with.

Ghost says nothing.

Ghost hasn't said anything since they left the safehouse at dawn. He sits with the stillness of a man who has compressed himself into pure function—no wasted movement, no wasted breath, no wasted thought. His eyes, the only part of him visible above the balaclava, move in the steady sweep of a scan pattern. West wall weak point. Generator housing. Fuel storage. The two guards on the gate with AKs held like they learned from films rather than training.

Amateurs. The whole compound is run by amateurs with just enough cruelty to compensate.

At forty-two, Simon "Ghost" Riley is the second oldest thing in the truck that isn't the engine. They don't call him Simon much anymore. Price does, occasionally, in moments of gravity—pulling the name out like a key to a room that's usually locked. The others say Ghost because Ghost is what he prefers, and what Ghost prefers is what Ghost gets, because nobody argues with a six-foot-four wall of silence that can clear a room of infected in under thirty seconds with a knife.

The truck crests a rise and Ashworth opens below them.

It's bigger than it was.

Every time they come back, it's bigger. The core settlement—the original industrial estate that Holt commandeered in year one—sits at the centre like a fist; corrugated steel walls twenty feet high, reinforced with concrete barriers, razor wire coiled along the top in thick, gleaming loops. Watchtowers at the corners, manned. A Union Jack hanging from the tallest, bleached almost white by weather and neglect. Inside the core, maybe three hundred people live in relative safety—Holt's inner circle, his enforcers, the skilled workers he values, the women he keeps.

But the core isn't Ashworth anymore. Ashworth is the sprawl.

It presses outward from the walls in every direction like a net of black veins—a shanty city of lean-tos, repurposed caravans, shipping containers stacked two high with ladders between them, tarpaulin roofs stretched over frameworks of salvaged timber. Cooking fires trail smoke into the October air. Washing lines sag between structures, strung with clothes that will never fully dry in this climate. The sound of it—two thousand people crammed into a space designed for industrial machinery—carries across the valley; hammering, shouting, a baby crying, dogs barking, the generator's diesel thrum underneath everything like a mechanical heartbeat.

Two thousand.

The number matters because numbers are power, and Dean Holt counts every mouth the way a miser counts coins. It doesn't matter that most of them are sick, malnourished, living in the outskirts where the guards respond slower and the rations stretch thinner. It doesn't matter that the feral children—orphans, parentless packs running semi-wild through the shanties—are too young to be useful and too numerous to manage. What matters is the headcount, and Holt doesn't need them healthy. He needs them dependent.

The outskirts are darker than the core. Not literally—the same weak October light falls on both—but in the way a room gets darker when you realise nobody's watching. The core has rules enforced by Holt's men. The outskirts have suggestions enforced by proximity. The further you get from the walls, the thinner the protection. The quieter the violence.

And on the eastern edge, downwind, The Pit. The scrapyard repurposed into a cremation site—metal frames and concrete foundations holding the permanent fire that disposes of the dead, infected and otherwise. The lowest-status outskirts residents tend it in shifts. The smoke rises day and night, greasy and black and saccharine, and serves double duty: disposal and landmark. Everyone in the region knows where Ashworth is. Holt wants it that way.

The patrol zone extends roughly two miles out—armed sweeps on rotation, clearance runs for rotten shamblers, watch posts on the major approach roads. Inside the zone, you're relatively safe from undead. The 141's truck passes the first watch post a mile out: two men with rifles and a fire barrel, who nod at Price without stopping them. They're expected.

The gates grind open on a hand-cranked chain. Metal on metal, shrieking. Soap winces. Price doesn't.

"Captain Price." The gate guard grins. Missing teeth—four, by Gaz's automatic count, which means no dental care, which means the man's gums are probably already infected, which means he'll lose more before winter. Gaz's jaw tightens around his floss stick. "The Dean's been expecting you."

"I'm sure he has."

They drive in through the outskirts first.

The truck moves at walking pace through a narrow track between structures, close enough to touch the walls on either side. Dirt-streaked faces watch them pass—gaunt, wary, the expressions of people who've learned to assess every newcomer as a potential threat or opportunity. A woman with a black eye carries a bucket of rainwater. A boy, maybe ten, sits on an overturned drum cleaning a rifle that's bigger than his torso. Two men argue over something in a doorway and go quiet as the truck passes, waiting for it to clear before resuming.

The smell is immediate and total. Rot and unwashed bodies and latrine trenches and cook smoke and the ever-present undercurrent of The Pit, and underneath all of it the specific, sour tang of too many people in too small a space with too little sanitation. Soap breathes through his mouth. Gaz's floss stick works double-time.

Ghost catalogues. Not the smell but the infrastructure. The gaps between structures. The sight lines. The choke points where an armed response would bottleneck. The places where two thousand people become a liability instead of an asset, because a crowd is only useful until it panics, and a panicked crowd in a shanty warren with one road in and one road out is a death trap.

They pass through the outskirts checkpoint—a manned barrier between the shanties and the core walls—and into Holt's domain. The difference is immediate. Cleaner. Quieter. The structures inside the core are sturdier, better maintained. Electric light glows behind windows, powered by the generators that the outskirts can hear but never benefit from. The air still smells, but it smells like diesel and concrete instead of sewage and despair.

The truck rolls to a stop outside the main building—Holt's palace, a former industrial unit reinforced with concrete barriers and steel plating. Two guards flank the entrance. They're bigger than the gate men. Better fed. The kind of fed that means someone else isn't.

"Leave the weapons visible but slung," Price says, killing the engine. He takes the cigar from his mouth, examines it, puts it in his breast pocket. A ritual completed. "We're not here to start anything."

"And if he starts something?" Gaz asks casually, kissing his teeth as he takes in the scenery.

"Then we finish it. But he won't. He wants the engine more than he wants trouble."

They climb out. Four men moving with the unconscious synchronisation of a unit that's breathed in rhythm for over a decade.

Price leads. Ghost falls to his right flank—six-four, balaclava, moving with a silence that shouldn't be possible for a man his size. Gaz left, rifle slung, dark eyes sweeping. Soap rear, where he can watch their backs and keep his mouth furthest from Holt's ears. The zippo appears in his hand—open, shut, click-snap, click-snap—the fidget as automatic as breathing.

The interior is warm. That's the first wrong thing—warmth is a luxury, and Holt's burning generator fuel on space heaters. The second wrong thing is the smell. Cooked meat, actual cooked meat, and something underneath it. Perfume. Floral. Expensive. In a world that smells like diesel and rot and the burn pit's greasy residue, the scent of perfume is so alien it stops Gaz mid-step.

Price clocks it too. His eyes move, just once, across the room.

Holt's holding court.

He's at the far end of the space, set up on a raised platform built from shipping pallets and plywood—a throne room constructed from rubbish. Mismatched furniture, a leather sofa with the stuffing coming out, a coffee table covered in bottles and ammunition and a leather-bound ledger that's closed but prominent. His men—eight, nine of them—spread around the room, drinking, eating, talking too loudly. They look up when the 141 enters. The conversation doesn't stop, but it shifts.

Two men flank the sofa.

The first is Danny—big bloke, shaved head, enforcer, the physical threat that keeps Ashworth's population in line through the simple mathematics of violence.

The second is thinner, smaller, almost forgettable: mousey hair receding at the temples, clean-shaven in a world where nobody bothers, wearing clothes that are deliberately neat in the way of a man who has made professionalism his camouflage. He holds the ledger's twin in his arms—another leather-bound book, open, a pencil behind his ear. His eyes are quick and small, and they move over the 141 with the particular attention of a man who counts everything.

Fletcher. Price has dealt with him before. Neil Fletcher, Holt's bookkeeper—the man who knows every number in Ashworth. Every ration card, every birth, every death, every resource allocation. Danny keeps people in line through fear. Fletcher keeps them in line through need. He decides who eats and how much. He decides which outskirts families get medicine when the children are sick. And every decision is a transaction, even when the price isn't spoken aloud.

Dean Holt stands.

He's shorter than every man in the 141, but he takes up space like something pressurised. Shaved head, thick neck corded with veins, the barrel chest of a man who's never stopped eating well while everyone else got thin. Leather jacket over a bare chest, which would be absurd if the grin weren't worse. The stumped left hand—three fingers and two shiny keloid nubs where the others used to be, bitten off in year one and cauterised gruesomely with a lighter—comes up in a wave.

"Captain!" He calls out like they're mates. Like this is a pub. "Right on time. Bloody love that about you, John. Military precision. Even now, eh? World's gone to shite and you're still running on a clock."

"Dean." Price's voice is level. A transaction. "Engine's outside. Marine diesel, four-stroke, twelve hundred horsepower. Intact."

"Straight to business." Holt clicks his tongue. "No drink first? No catch-up?" He gestures at the table, the unlabeled bottles. "Got vodka. Actual vodka, not the bathtub piss. Came off a shipment from somewhere that used to be Poland."

"We'll pass."

"'Course you will." Holt's grin doesn't move. It never moves. It's not a smile—it's a display. "You lot always pass. Monks, I swear." He looks at his men, playing the room. "Four fit lads and they won't touch a drop. Won't touch anything I offer. Makes a man wonder, doesn't it?"

A ripple of laughter from the room. Dutiful and rehearsed. Fletcher doesn't laugh but he smiles, thin and precise, and writes something in his ledger.

Soap's zippo clicks. His jaw tightens. Gaz stares at a point six inches above Holt's head. Ghost does nothing. Ghost is a wall with eyes.

"Wonder all you like," Price says. "We're here for the trade."

"And we'll get to it; we'll get to it." Holt drops back onto his sofa, spreads his arms along the back. King of rubbish mountain. "But first—first, I've got to show you something. Because you come here every few months, Price, and you never stay long enough to see what I've built. What Ashworth is now. And I think—" He holds up the stumped hand, wagging a remaining finger. "—I think you don't appreciate it."

"I don't think about you at all, Dean."

The grin flickers. Just a fraction. Then it's back, wider.

"Funny man." Holt snaps his fingers. The sound is sharp in the warm, perfumed air. "Bring her out."

A door opens at the back of the room.

One of Holt's men comes through first—big, scarred, the universal look of hired muscle. He's holding something.

A leash.

Leather. Proper leather, the kind you'd see in a high-end pet shop in the world before, attached to a collar—also leather, also deliberate, fitted snug around a throat that is very obviously, very deliberately human.

And then you step through the door.

The room shifts.

It's subtle—a recalibration, the way a room changes when something enters it that doesn't belong. Holt's men look up from their drinks with the glazed, proprietary interest of men who've seen this show before. Fletcher's pencil stops moving. His eyes fix on you with a quality that's different from the others—not the lazy entitlement of Holt's enforcers but something hungrier, more patient. A man watching something through a shop window, calculating whether there's a way to get it without paying full price.

But the 141—

Gaz sees you first.

He clocks the collar. The leash. The hand on the other end of it. And something crosses his face that he can't hide fast enough—a flinch, quick and total, like someone has pressed a thumb into a bruise. His eyes cut to Price, then back to you, and his grip shifts on his rifle strap.

You’re in a skimpy black dress and matching black heels. It's ridiculous and it's the whole point; satin or velvet, something that catches the light from the bare bulbs, spaghetti straps and a slit up one thigh. The kind of dress that belonged to Saturday nights and champagne and choosing to be looked at. Here it's a costume. A display case.

Your skin is clean beneath it—conspicuously clean, in a world where clean means someone is spending resources on you. Water, soap, time—luxuries that two thousand people in the outskirts would riot over, poured into maintaining one woman's surface. Soft where the world has made everyone else rough. Your legs are shaved. Your hair is down, long curls falling past your shoulders, catching the light in a way that says someone's been brushing it. Maintaining it. Like grooming a show animal.

You’re beautiful. That's the weapon. That's the point. The kind of beautiful that's become currency in a world that trades in people—soft and shapely, kept. The kind men would trade their last pill for, their last round for, their last shred of something decent for. Holt knows it. He's counted on it. He's invested in it the way Fletcher invests in ledger entries.

The tattoos run up one arm in a full sleeve—colour and black, the story of a life lived when tattoo parlours existed. More scattered across the other forearm, bleeding into your collarbone. A large piece on your thigh flashes through the slit of the dress. Pre-collapse art. Evidence of a person who used to make choices about her own body.

And the bruises.

They're on your upper arms. Fingerprints. Four dark ovals and a thumb, pressed into your skin like someone grabbed and didn't care about the marks—or cared specifically about the marks. There are more at your collarbone and neck, disappearing under the flimsy neckline.

You move the way a person moves when they've learned the choreography of compliance—chin up, because he likes it up. Eyes forward, because he doesn't like the floor. Spine straight, because posture means he doesn't have to correct it in front of company. Every piece of you is arranged.

But your eyes.

Your eyes are somewhere else entirely.

Soap catches it. He's looking at your face while everyone else is looking at everything else, and what he sees there is a woman who has left the building. Who has pulled some essential part of herself so far inward that what's walking across this room is a shell running on muscle memory. He's seen it before. In Urzikstan. In the places they don't talk about from the Credenhill years. The lights are on. Nobody's home. Nobody's home on purpose.

His zippo stops.

"Gentlemen," Holt says, and his voice has the particular warmth of a man showing off a car. "Meet Sugar."

He tugs the leash. Not hard—a demonstration. You stop where you’re told to stop. Beside the sofa, within arm's reach, standing like an ornament. Fletcher shifts his weight, angling himself closer by a degree. His pencil taps his ledger.

"Found her about three months ago. Or—the lads found her, technically. Out past Ross-on-Wye, living in a farmhouse with a beast of a dog and a shotgun and not much else." Holt's hand comes up, casual, possessive, and settles on your hip. His thick fingers press into the fabric. "Killed the bloody dog while she almost killed two of my men with that shotgun before they got it off her. Spirited, isn't she?"

He looks up at you, grinning triumphantly.

"Say hello to our guests, Sugar."

Your eyes sweep the room. They pass over Holt's men, and they clearly mean nothing to you. They pass over Fletcher, and something tightens in your jaw so briefly it's almost invisible. Then they find the 141, the four men standing in a loose formation near the entrance, and for a half-second, something flickers behind the blankness. Recognition maybe. Not of them specifically, but of what they are. The way they stand. The discipline. The difference between these four and every other man in this room.

Then the flicker dies, and you do what you were told.

"Hello." Flat. Slightly accented.

Holt lights up.

"Hear that?" He squeezes your hips with both hands now, leash wrapped around one fist, obviously delighted. "Not from here. Won't tell me where, though. Three months and she won't tell me where she's from. Stubborn little thing." He says it with admiration, the way you'd admire a quality in an animal.

"European, I think. Somewhere on the continent. Won't give me a bloody word of it." He laughs. "But smart. Fuck me, she's smart. Can field-dress a wound, can read a map, knows plants—which ones'll kill you, which ones'll cure you. Got herself a whole little survival operation going before we found her. Books and everything."

His hands slide from your hips to the small of your back, then lower.

"And she's still feisty, aren't you, Sugar? Behind closed doors." He looks at Price over your shoulder while nuzzling your hair, conspiratorial. Man to man. "Still bites. I like that. Means she's not broken yet. Where's the fun if they're broken, aye?"

Price's expression doesn't change. Not one muscle. He could be carved from the Herefordshire bedrock.

"We're here for the trade, Dean."

"Yeah, you keep saying that." Holt stands. He's still holding the leash. He walks around you in a slow half-circle, and his free hand, the good one, catches the strap of your dress. He pulls it down off one shoulder. Then the other one. The fabric slides—not all the way, but enough. Enough to show the elegant curve of your shoulders, the bruises at your collarbone in full, the swell of your breasts above the neckline. He's undressing you by degrees, in a room full of men, with the same casualness of someone unwrapping a birthday package.

And you don't flinch; don’t react at all. Your hands stay at your sides. Not a hitch in your breath.

Gaz looks away. His throat works. Fletcher doesn't look away. He watches openly with the focused stillness of a man memorising something for later.

"Look at that," Holt taunts, to no one and everyone simultaneously. "Clean. Soft. When's the last time any of you saw skin like that? Eh?" He looks at his men, who murmur and grin on cue. Then back at the 141.

"Oh, right. Never. Because you lot don't look. That's your thing, innit? Too good for it. Too fucking principled." He drops the strap, pats your shoulder like you're furniture, and pulls the dress back up with a rough tug. "Makes me wonder, honestly. Four men. No women. Not ever." He tilts his head at Price. "You all sharing a sleeping bag, Captain? No judgement. Well," he pauses, grins, "some judgement."

Laughter from the room. You stand perfectly still through it, adjusting the straps methodically.

And then Soap speaks.

He shouldn't. He knows he shouldn't. Price told him not to. But something about the leash, or the bruises, or the flat nothing in your voice when you said hello, or the way Holt's hand keeps finding your body like it belongs to him—something trips a wire in Johnny MacTavish that no amount of operational discipline has ever been able to fully deactivate.

"The engine." His voice is steady but his accent's thickened, the Glasgow in it hardening every consonant. "Twelve hundred horsepower. Ye want it or nah?"

Holt looks at him. Really looks, for the first time. The grin sharpens.

"The Scotsman speaks." Holt steps closer. He's still holding your leash, wrapped around his stumped fist. "You like her, son? Caught ya looking." He snickers, glances back at you, then at Soap, and something cruel and delighted moves behind his eyes. "Tell you what—throw in something extra on top of the engine and I'll let you have an hour with her. She's good. Trained her myself."

The silence that follows is a physical thing.

Soap doesn't blink. His bright blue eyes stay fixed on Holt's face and something in them goes very, very flat. The zippo is still in his hand. He's stopped flipping it. His thumb rests on the lid like a man resting his finger alongside a trigger guard.

Fletcher watches this exchange with interest. His pencil moves.

Price steps forward. One step. Enough.

"The engine for the agreed supplies," Price interjects with finality. His voice hasn't changed. Hasn't risen. He could be reading coordinates. "Ammunition, antibiotics, water purification tablets. As discussed. Nothing else."

Holt holds the moment. Then he laughs again, big and theatrical this time, and waves his stumped hand.

"Always business with you, Price. Always business." He drops onto the sofa and tugs the leash, pulling you down onto the armrest beside him. His good hand settles on your bare thigh, thumb stroking over the edge of your tattoo through the slit of the dress. "Fine. Let's talk numbers. Sugar, pour us drinks."

He lets go of the leash. You stand on heels, smooth the dress with hands that don't shake, and move to the table.

Fletcher intercepts your path. It's subtle—a half-step to the side, placing himself between you and the bottles so you must adjust, must pass closer to him than necessary. His hand doesn't touch. It doesn't need to. The proximity is the message. You navigate around him without acknowledgement, the way someone would navigate around a piece of furniture, and something in Fletcher's thin smile curdles.

Soap sees it. Files it. Adds it to the list of things wrong with this room.

And Ghost, who hasn't moved, hasn't spoken yet, who has stood like a shadow in a skull-print balaclava and watched the entire display with eyes the colour of cold tea—

Ghost is looking at your wrists.

At the thin scars on the insides of them. Not old. Not from the before. From rope or zip ties. From being tied. And underneath the compliance and the rehearsed posture and the empty eyes, he sees what Soap saw but reads it differently. Soap saw a woman who'd shut down. Ghost sees a woman who's waiting.

Not broken. Holding.

His eyes move from your wrists to your face, and for one fraction of a second, you look back, meeting his gaze.

Then you go on and pour the vodka and carry it to Holt without spilling a drop.