But they’re not gone. Not really.
There are people who leave marks on your skin, and then there are people who leave fingerprints on your soul. The kind you carry into every version of yourself that comes after. That’s what they are to me now. Not just chapters. Not just scars.Homes.In their own strange, wounded ways.
I face forward again, letting the silence settle over us like soft fabric. The hum of the Porsche is smooth beneath my feet, the world slowly unrolling in front of us in long, unwritten lines. The road is empty. The sky is the kind of soft blue that promises calm after storms. Everything feels quieter. Not in a hollow way. In a freeing one.
My hand rests in his, and his thumb moves slowly over mine, over the places where I once split open just to stay alive. Andwhen he looks at me, really looks, I see it: not power, not darkness, not control.
I see a man who stayed.
A man who gave up his crown and put down his weapons, not for absolution, not for show, but for love.
“I keep thinking about who we were,” I say quietly, my voice more breath than sound.
He doesn’t speak, just listens. That’s what he’s learned. He used to fill silence with dominance, with danger. Now, he lets it breathe. He lets me breathe.
I look out the window, the world soft and endless ahead of us.
“I was always surviving something,” I continue. “But survival isn’t living. It’s not even close.”
His fingers curl a little tighter around mine. “And now?”
“Now I want slow mornings. I want mismatched mugs and cold sheets and your hand on my back when I can’t sleep. I want ugly fights and honest apologies and growing pains that mean we’re still trying.”
I turn to him.
“I want real,” I say. “Even when it’s quiet. Even when it’s messy. Especially then.”
He nods, once. Like he’s carving my words into himself.
“You’ll have it,” he says, softly. “You already do.”
I close my eyes.
We are not a dangerous beginning anymore.
We are the ending that was always coming.
Inevitable.
The road opens ahead of us, long and winding.
“Where to?” he asks.
I smile.
“Home,” I say. “Wherever we make it.”
Epilogue
Where the Devil Finally Rests
Aslanov
Peace doesn’t announce itself—it just arrives one morning, wrapped in sea air and soft light, and you realize you survived long enough to feel it.
It’s quiet here.
The kind of quiet that breathes, not suffocates. The kind that comes with salt in the air and birds that don’t startle easy. Waves break in the distance, slow and deliberate, like the ocean is keeping time for something much older than us. When I wake, I hear it before I open my eyes, the tide rolling in and pulling back again like breath. The floorboards creak under my bare feet as I move through the house, but it doesn’t bother me. I built it this way. Nothing in this place pretends to be more than it is.
