ALEXANDER
Emmaline is standing in the middle of the room and I can’t move for a moment.
That is not something that happens to me. I have stood in rooms with men twice her size holding weapons with far less hesitation than this, and yet here I am, stopped in the wreckage of the door I just put through its frame, because she is standing there and she is real and she is in front of me and the weeks between then and now collapse into a single breath.
She looks thinner. Pale in a way that the lamplight makes worse, shadows carved under her eyes that weren’t there before. She looks like someone who hasn’t slept properly in longer than she would admit to.
She has never looked more like herself to me. I don’t know how to explain that. I just know it’s true.
But then I look at her eyes, and th
