Chapter 2

The silence in the cabin had a texture now.

Selene couldn't have described it to anyone later—she'd been asleep, and what she knew of the next forty minutes came to her the way dreams come, in fragments that dissolved at the edges when she reached for them. But the fragments were there: the soft weight of the blanket that hadn't been on her before, the smell of wool and warm leather, the steady, patient rhythm of a heartbeat beneath her ear that wasn't her own.

When she finally surfaced, blinking against the cabin light, the first thing she registered was that she didn't know where she was.

The second was that her cheek was resting on something that was not a pillow.

She came awake slowly, the way a swimmer rises through layers of water. Awareness arrived in pieces: the hum of the engines, the play of daylight across the dark wood panels, the particular smell of the cabin that she'd been cataloging all flight—leather, polish, a faint trace of the coffee she'd refused. And beneath it all, warmth. **Points:**

*She was lying on her husband's shoulder.*

Selene's eyes flew open. The motion was too fast; the cabin tilted, and she had to grip the armrest to steady herself. The blanket slid from her shoulders, puddling in her lap, and she stared at it—the cream fringed wool, the impossible fact of its existence—as if it had materialized from thin air.

"What—" Her voice came out gravelly, unused. She cleared her throat. "What happened?"

Rais didn't turn. He was reading something on a tablet now, the checklist long since set aside, his face in profile turned toward the window. The afternoon light caught the line of his jaw, the dense black of his beard. He looked, she thought with a small pang of something she couldn't name, entirely unsurprised by her existence.

"You fell asleep."

"I—" She blinked, trying to assemble the sequence. The last clear thing she remembered was the descent checklist. The pen moving. The sound of her own voice saying *I'm fine* in a tone that the memory now made her wince at. "Did I—how long was I out?"

"Forty-one minutes."

"*Forty-one—*" She looked down at the blanket again. "Rais, I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to—I must have been so heavy, you should have moved me, you could have—"

"I didn't want to."

The words landed in the cabin like a stone dropped into still water. They didn't ripple. They just sat there, dense and immovable, and Selene found that she didn't know what to do with them.

"You—what?"

"I said I didn't want to." He still didn't look at her. His thumb moved across the tablet, dismissing whatever document it was, and he set it aside on the seat beside him. "You were tired. I let you rest."