For the first time in years, perhaps in his entire life, the Grey had fallen asleep without meaning to.
He didn't remember closing his eyes, he didn't remember the exact moment the world vanished.
He remembered only one thing: the warmth of Naiara's palm resting on his.
A tiny, ridiculous contact. A meaningless touch, and yet powerful enough to keep him awake inside while the world outside sank into silence.
When he opened his eyes again, dawn was filtering faintly through her half-closed curtains.
He was still there, beside her bed.
The armchair slightly pulled closer, his posture half-relaxed, half-rigid, and most of all, her hand, still resting in his.
He slowly pulled away, careful not to wake her.
Naiara slept deeply, her lashes still damp with dried tears, her lips parted in a tired breath.
She looked younger, she looked… fragile.
A thing that did not concern him.
That must not concern him.
He rose without a sound, left her room without turning back.
He didn't want to turn back.
The shower in his own room enveloped him in a cascade of scalding water that burned his skin.
It was a controlled pain, a pain he understood, unlike the kind she had stirred inside him.
He closed his eyes and saw everything again: the tear sliding down her cheek, her scream, the kick, the way her voice trembled when she begged him to stop.
The way she had let him pick her up despite everything, and that question…
"Can you be a lamb for one night?"
A stupid request. Disarming, dangerous.
The Grey braced himself against the shower wall, the water hit him like a rain of needles.
To break a woman, he never needed ropes or weapons, words were enough and yet, seeing her break had hit him in the most forbidden point, the point no one knew.
His back.
He opened his eyes sharply, stepped out of the shower, water still dripping down his skin.
He stood before the mirror, a gesture he hadn't done in years… Too many years.
He inhaled, then slowly turned his torso.
The scar waited for him.
An uneven, brutal line running across the skin behind his hip and climbing up his back.
It didn't reach the front like Naiara's.
It stopped sooner but it was there.
The mark of his past, of who he had been, of what he had sworn never to be again.
The Grey closed his eyes, and the memory detonated.
A dark room, a cold floor. His breath, broken.
A man's laughter, the glint of a blade.
The strike, pain and the darkness that seized him violently, like a hand over his face, and him, a boy.
Angry, dirty, bleeding and completely, utterly alone.
The Grey staggered for a moment.
His fingers tightened around the edge of the sink.
More than a decade had passed and he had never seen that scene again.
Naiara had opened a crack: small, tiny.
A single push could make everything collapse.
"I need to get myself back," he muttered through clenched teeth.
An order, a prayer, a warning and yet, the more he tried to push her image away, the more she returned: the scar, her eyes full of pain and courage, the way she looked at him when she asked, "Can you be a lamb for one night?"
Damn her.
He shoved a hand through his dark-blond hair. Took a breath, letting cold rise slowly through his spine.
The ice was his nature, his power. What had made him what he was, and his decision was cold, fast, lethal.
"Bring her to me," he ordered his men when they stepped inside at his signal.
His voice was perfectly flat again, cold, implacable.
"Who, sir?" one of them asked.
The Grey turned just enough for his eyes, two shards of pure ice, to meet theirs.
"Naiara's mother."
They nodded and vanished without asking anything.
He dressed. Shirt, trousers, belt. Not a detail out of place.
The armor was back… Or almost.
They took five minutes, five minutes in which the Grey stood motionless in his room, hands clasped behind his back, his gaze lost somewhere in the void.
Five minutes in which his heart, if he still had one, tried to forget the warmth of her palm.
The door opened with a soft sound.
Naiara's mother stepped inside.
She was pale, frightened, her hair disheveled, wearing a thin robe too light for the cold hallway. When she saw him, she froze completely.
She didn't speak. Neither did he.
For several seconds, there was only silence, then he motioned for her to come closer.
The woman obeyed, trembling.
When she stood before him, the Grey spoke with surgical calm.
"Do you know why you're here?"
The woman swallowed, eyes wide and wet.
"T-to hurt me?" she whispered.
The Grey studied her, for too long.
Then he said: "No."
One word, made of stone.
She exhaled a breath so faint it barely existed.
He continued, voice lower now: "You're here because you… need to see someone."
The woman stiffened. "M-my… my daughter?" she whispered.
The Grey didn't answer immediately.
He simply stepped closer, slowly, until he was near enough to see her pulse racing in her throat, then he leaned slightly toward her, as though revealing a precious secret.
"But not yet."
The words fell into the room like a blade.
The woman went pale.
The Grey lifted his gaze and closed the conversation with a sentence no one could interpret.
"When the moment is right, I will be the one to bring her to you." And inside himself, without saying it, without fully allowing the thought to form… He already knew he would, not for kindness, not for redemption.
His truth was far simpler: Naiara was the only crack in his ice and he wanted to see just how far that crack could go.