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Fuck, she speaks Turkish too.
Neri had kept my culture alive. She’d given pieces of me to my daughter while I’d been nothing more than a ghost.
My ruined heart couldn’t take this.
My pulse shot sky high, unable to cope.
“W-Who am I?” I repeated her question in English, my voice wet and scratchy. “I...” My gaze shot past hers and returned to Neri’s. Always to Neri. Forever to the matching, missing piece of my soul. “I—”
I choked.
I stumbled.
I couldn’t.
Neri plastered both hands over her mouth, holding back her sobs, but it didn’t stop her entire body from shuddering. Her left arm held the same ink that’d been flayed off me and my mind tripped with horrors of before, then, and now.
I forgot what my daughter asked, and only one word shot to mind. A word I’d always associate with the love I had for my moon-given wife. “Canim...”
Burying her face into her lap, Neri cried brutally hard.
Teddy and Eddie glanced at her. An unspoken look passed between them. Without a word, they whispered something into Ayla’s ear, reached past me to turn off the Jeep and lock the door, then turned and walked barefoot across the road. Teddy ran his fingers over Neri’s damp hair and Eddie pressed a kiss to her forehead before both men padded down the side of the house and disappeared with Ayla.
I stood there for a millennia after they’d left.
The street was quiet and empty.
The sunset well and truly smothered by dusk.
Neri didn’t move from her ball on the grass, and I didn’t have the strength to walk to her.
We stared at each other.
Eyes devouring.
Hearts pounding.
Both of us afraid.
So fucking afraid this wasn’t real.
But then...she started to crawl toward me. On hands and knees as if she didn’t have the power to walk.
It broke my terrified trance.
I forgot I needed my cane for support.
I forgot who I was and what I’d suffered.
I ran.
I ran like I’d been able to run in the past, accepting the prosthetic as a part of me as I bolted across the road, leapt the curb, then slammed to my knees before her.
I felt no physical pain.
Only emotional.
Spiritual.
