My
voice broke. “Back there, when you fell... I couldn’t breathe, Luca. I couldn’t... I don’t know what I would’ve done.”
He turned, pulling me gently closer with his uninjured arm. “You’re not going to lose me. Not now. Not ever. You and I—we’re going to make it.”
“You promise?”
He leaned his forehead to mine. “With everything I have.”
I felt the warmth of his breath, the heat in his skin, even beneath the cold of the cave. The pain in his body didn’t matter in that moment. All that existed was us. In the silence of the cave, with the scent of moss and earth around us, we were just two people trying to survive.
“I don’t want to keep running,” I murmured. “I want to stop, breathe, build something.”
“We will,” he said softly. “Just not yet.”
“Yeah. Not yet.”
I pulled a blanket from
