**SASHA**
I wake before dawn with the strange certainty that I am not alone even though the room is quiet, and it takes a few slow breaths before my mind catches up to what my body already knows, that Adam is there, asleep on the other side of the bed, close enough that the bond hums low and steady beneath my ribs like a second heartbeat I forgot how to notice. I lie still for a moment, staring at the ceiling, cataloguing ordinary things the way I always do when something feels too big, the faint hum of the heating in the walls, the muted shift of patrol change somewhere below us, the clean scent of soap lingering in the air from last night.
Nothing about this feels dramatic. That’s what unsettles me.
We didn’t cross any lines. We didn’t touch beyond proximity. We didn’t say anything th
