Chapter 24 Silver and Ambar eyes

Two men witnessed her that night. One through glass. One through something older than glass.

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As the car glides away from the restaurant, Tarmo leans forward and taps Mikhail’s shoulder, voice low. “Close the partition, please.”

Mikhail’s eyes find mine in the rearview mirror — silver, unreadable. Then he looks away, and the glass glides up.

Velvet seats. Warm lamplight. Abomey reduced to an abstract blur of horns and pop songs behind the hush.

Later — how much later I can’t say — I lie in the moonlit bed, skin cooling, the city’s sounds drifting through half-curtained windows.

I know I am loved. By Tarmo, by Karim, by Asdar. I fiercely claim my right to move between their worlds, to honour my own desires.

And yet. Karim’s scent still faint on my skin, Tarmo’s hands so recently on me — I can’t quell the tremor. I think of the months with Karim: his gentle loyalty, the reverence with which he touched my changing body. Gratitude, ache, and a strange sense of having outpaced my own longing.

Is this what freedom costs — a constant paradox of fulfilment and hunger, of never quite belonging to anyone, or even to myself?

I let the city’s old stories carry me under.

In that haze between dream and waking, warmth. A soft brush of lips against my brow. I open my eyes.

Asdar. Limned in pale shadow, impossible and intimately real. He strokes the hair back from my temple, his eyes dark and gold at once. He says nothing for a long moment — just looks at me the way he always has, as though I am something ancient he has been waiting to find.

Then, quietly: “You are not lost. You are claimed.”

The warmth in my belly blooms beneath the blanket, turning to light. I reach for him but he is already dissolving — outline fading into motes, into the moonlit air.

I look down at my shining skin. Then up at the empty room.

I lie back among tangled sheets, solitary queen, comforted not by certainty but by the fact of it — that even briefly, all the worlds that love me know where I am.

I.Ph.

A chapter from The Memory Cartographer | Alkebulan Chronicles © 2026 I.Ph. de Lange All rights reserved. Published by CYcrds OÜ.