The mirror shard shouldn't have frightened me. Just a piece of polished metal propped against the wall, something Dorian used for shaving when we had the luxury of caring about such things. But when I caught my reflection while reaching for my clothes, I flinched.
She looked like me—the woman in the metal. Same dark hair, same silver-touched eyes, same scars mapping a history of divine interference. But I couldn't shake the feeling that she might move wrong. Might smile when I didn't. Might be another echo waiting to claim what I'd fought to keep.
"Aria."
Dorian's voice came soft from behind me. He'd been watching—not the invasive scrutiny of judgment but the careful attention of someone who'd learned to read the language of my tensions.
"I'm fine," I said, the lie automatic as breathing.
He didn't challenge it with words. Instead, he moved closer, telegraphing each step so I could move away if I needed. When I didn't, he stopped just behind me, close enough that I felt his warmth but not touching. Waiting.
"I can't stop seeing them," I admitted to the mirror. "All the versions. The ones I wasn't, the ones I almost was, the one who tried to replace her. Every surface that reflects, I expect to see someone else looking back."
His hand moved into my peripheral vision, palm up, offering. I stared at it for long moments—this simple gesture of connection—before finally letting my fingers intertwine with his.
"Close your eyes," he said.
"Dorian—"
"Trust me."
I did. That was the miracle of it—after everything, I still could.
With my eyes closed, the world narrowed to sensation. His free hand came to rest on my shoulder, warm and solid and undeniably real. Not grasping, not directing—just present.
"This is you," he said, thumb tracing the curve where neck met shoulder. "This tension here, from carrying her when your body screamed to rest. This scar," his fingers ghosted over the mark near my collarbone, "from the night you chose fight over freeze."
He moved with deliberate slowness, narrating each part of me like a cartographer mapping precious territory. The curve of my spine that had bent but never broken. The stretch marks across my hips—silver-pink proof that I'd expanded to accommodate miracles. Each touch was warm, grounding, pulling me back into my own skin.
"I'm not sacred," I whispered, caught between statement and question.
"No," he agreed, and his hand came to rest over my heart. "You're something better. You're real."
When I opened my eyes, he was kneeling before me, looking up with those amber eyes that had seen me at my worst and still somehow found me worth waiting for. His hands rested on my hips, but lightly—a question, not a claim.
"Let me?" he asked. "Let me show you what I see when I look at you?"
My throat was too tight for words, so I nodded.
He began with my feet—an unexpected intimacy that made me gasp. His lips pressed to the arch, the ankle, the place where small bones had carried me through exile and back. He moved up slowly, reverently, kissing the scars on my calves from running through thorned forests, the knees that had knelt in defiance rather than submission.
When he reached my thighs, he paused, looking up to check. I was trembling—not with fear or cold but with the overwhelming sensation of being treasured. Being worthy of such careful attention.
"Please," I managed, though I wasn't sure what I was asking for.
He seemed to understand anyway. His mouth pressed to the inside of my thigh, beard scraping gentle contrast to soft lips. He stayed there, breathing against sensitive skin, until my trembling eased. Only then did he continue his worship—for that's what it was, worship without divinity, the kind offered between equals who choose to kneel.
When his mouth finally found the center of me, I cried out—not from pleasure, though that followed, but from the shock of being touched with such intention. No claiming, no desperate hunger, just steady, patient attention that said: You deserve to feel good. You deserve to feel.
My hands found his hair, not to direct but to anchor myself as he took me apart with deliberate care. Each stroke of his tongue was a reminder: I was here, I was whole, I was allowed to want things that had nothing to do with survival.
When release washed over me, it came gentle as rain after drought. Not the shattering climaxes born of desperation, but something deeper—a settling, a coming home to a body I'd been afraid to fully inhabit.
He rose to kiss me, letting me taste myself on his lips—earthy, human, real. "More?" he asked against my mouth.
"Yes," I breathed. "But—slowly. I want to feel everything."
He smiled, understanding. When he entered me, it was with the same patient reverence he'd shown throughout. We moved together like dancers learning new steps, finding rhythm in the space between heartbeats. His hands mapped territories they knew by heart but touched like new discovery. My body, so long a battlefield, became a garden—tended, cherished, allowed to bloom.
I didn't close my eyes this time. I watched his face, saw myself reflected in his gaze, and for the first time in so long, I recognized who looked back. Not a vessel, not a survivor, not a mother or myth or mistake. Just Aria, making love to the man who'd waited for her to remember she was worth loving.
When we finished, breathless and tangled, I felt it—the exhale I'd been holding since before Ashara's birth. It left me in a rush, taking with it the last of the fear that had lived beneath my skin. My body was mine. Had always been mine. I'd just needed reminding.
"Better?" Dorian asked, pressing kisses to my temple.
"Whole," I corrected, and meant it.
The mirror shard still leaned against the wall, but I no longer feared what it might show. Let it reflect whatever it wished. I knew who I was now—not by what I'd survived or what I'd refused to become, but by how it felt to be touched with love instead of purpose.
The fear was gone, kissed away by patience and presence and the radical act of being seen without being judged.
I slept that night without flinching, wrapped in arms that knew every scar and loved the story they told.
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