Eli
Ronan comes back from the south line with cold in his hands and war in his shoulders.
He doesn’t speak when he shuts the cabin door. He doesn’t need to, the air he carries in tastes like iron and frost and decision. He drops his gloves on the table and starts stripping maps of their weights like he’s undressing a problem he plans to bruise.
I watch from the hearth, hands wrapped around a mug that went cold an hour ago. I slept in snatches while he was gone. Ten minutes here, thirty there, all of them noisy. If I close my eyes I can still feel the bite of the snare in my ankle, the moment the world tilted and I had to choose between fear and fury.
“Find anything?” I ask.
He peels his coat off, black shirt clinging to his back, tattoos slick with melted snow. “Enough to tell me we’v
