The first week blurred into the second.
The second quietly became the third.
And Kira was still there.
Ash hadn't asked her to stay. He hadn't needed to. She simply… hadn't left. Every morning she woke before him—he'd learned she was an early riser, slipping out to check the perimeter while the mist still clung to the pines. Every night she returned smelling of wind and steel and something unmistakably hers, a scent that had begun to weave itself into the walls of his cabin, into his sheets, into his lungs.
The space between them had shifted. Narrowed.
It happened in increments so small he almost didn't notice until they'd already happened. The way she'd started leaving her boots by the door next to his. The coffee mug she'd claimed as her own was on the second shelf. The evening she'
