Page 102 of Lost in Fire

“Sleep,” Vanya urges, her voice gentle but firm. “We’ll be here when you wake up. I promise.”

Ember squeezes my hand carefully before rising. “Rest, Dad. We’ll keep watch.”

Dad.

The word follows me into sleep.

***

This time, when sleep claims me, it’s different. Peaceful. No nightmares, no images of fighting. Just deep, healing darkness.

I wake to moonlight streaming into the room, casting silver patterns across white walls. The monitors beep softly in the background. Vanya sits in the same chair, but she’s not sleeping. She’s watching me with an expression I can’t quite read.

“Better?” she asks quietly.

I take inventory. The pain has receded to a dull ache. My breathing comes easier. The crushing fatigue has lifted enough that thinking doesn’t feel like swimming through mud.

“Much.” I shift carefully, managing to prop myself up on my elbows without triggering agony. “How long this time?”

“Just a few hours. You were restless. Talking.”

“What did I say?”

A ghost of a smile crosses her face. “My name. Ember’s. You kept asking if we were safe.”

Typical. Even unconscious, I can’t stop worrying about them.

In the moonlight, with her guard down, Vanya looks more vulnerable than I’ve ever seen her. The ice-queen mask of the Shadowhand has completely crumbled, leaving only the woman I fell in love with, not the stranger she had to become to survive.

“I thought I’d lost you,” she whispers into the quiet. “When I saw what I’d done to you…” The dam breaks and suddenly she’s weeping. “I had no choice,” she continues, her voice raw through the sobs. “But I’ll never forgive myself for what I did to you.”

I find strength I didn’t know I still possessed. Despite the weakness in my limbs, despite the lingering pain, my voice comes out steady and sure.

“There’s nothing to forgive.”

“Hargen—”

“Listen to me.” I reach for her hand, grateful when she doesn’t pull away. “You did what you had to do to protect our daughter. I understand that now, more than ever. I’m her father. It’s what I would have told you to do.”

She stares at me like I’ve spoken in a foreign language. “How can you not hate me? Not just for the fire, but for… everything.”

The question breaks something open in my chest. Here she is—this incredible, dangerous, beautiful woman who sacrificed everything, including her own moral center, to protect our child—asking how I can forgive her for loving too fiercely.

“Because I know you,” I tell her simply. “I know the woman who chose death by fire rather than let harm come to me. I know the mother who built a wall of lies to keep our child safe. I know what it cost you to become the Shadowhand.”

Tears track down her cheeks in the silver light. “It changed me. The things I’ve done, the people I’ve hurt—”

“Are in the past.” My voice grows stronger as conviction fills me. “But through everything that’s happened—every impossible choice—there’s been one constant.”

“What?”

“Love.” The simple truth emerges through our shared ordeal like light through darkness. “It’s always been love. Your love for Ember drove every decision. Your love for me made you fight to save my life, even when it meant exposing yourself. And my love for both of you has been the only thing keeping me sane for two decades.”

Her breath hitches. “I don’t know how to be anything other than what I became.”

“Then we’ll figure it out.” I bring her hand to my lips, pressing a gentle kiss to her knuckles. “All of us. As a family.”

The word hangs between us, fragile and precious.Family.Not the mission objective or the protection detail or the complication we’ve all been calling it. Just three people who love each other despite impossible odds.

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