Pearl POV
When I first opened my eyes the world was soft and blurred, as if someone had wrapped the edges of reality in velvet. For a moment I didn’t know whether I was dreaming or waking, whether the heavy weight at my ribs was sorrow or sleep. Then the scent reached me: smoke and blood and the hard, metallic tang of iron. And beneath it, impossibly, the clean, fierce scent of him.
My eyelids fluttered, and there he was—Demyan—sitting at my bedside like a statue carved from midnight and fire, his fingers flattened over my belly, his face wet with tears I had not known he could shed. He looked like a ruin and a king all at once, and seeing him there with his hand on me was the most sacramental thing I’d ever witnessed.
For a long minute I simply watched him. He was talking, soft, rough
