The recovery was slow, measured in the ticking of the clock in our Tribeca penthouse and the changing of the seasons outside the floor-to-ceiling windows. My shoulder healed, the physical scar joining the map of marks on my body, but the silence between Yuri and me grew louder every day.
He was there, but he wasn't there. He would bring me tea, sit by the bed, and watch the sunset with me, but his eyes were always miles away—back in that shipyard, back in the basement of the Volkov estate, or perhaps even further back, in the room with the glass flowers.
"You're thinking about Mikhail," I said one evening, the sky outside a bruised, electric blue.
"I'm thinking about the brush," Yuri replied, his voice a ghost of the authority it once carried. "He had it for ten years, Jessy. He watched me grieve, he watched me hunt for her killer, and all the while, he was the one who held her last breath. I realized something when I felt his life leave him in that river."
"What?"
"That I am exactly what my father wanted me to be. A machine of vengeance. I saved you from the dark, but I brought the dark with me. It's in the way I look at you. It's in the way I touch you—always checking for a pulse, always waiting for the world to take you back."
I reached for him, but he stood up, walking toward the window. The distance between us felt like a canyon. "We won, Yuri. We're free."
"Are we?" he asked, turning to look at me. "Or are we just two ghosts pretending to be people?"
The penthouse, for all its luxury, had become a high-end decompression chamber. Yuri had replaced the UNI's glass walls with a different kind of transparency—the kind that comes when there are no more secrets to hide, yet no words left to speak. He patrolled the perimeter of our life with a restless, military precision, checking locks that didn't need checking and monitoring frequencies that had long since gone silent.
I watched him from the sofa, the phantom hum of the Ghost Code beneath my skin feeling like a betrayal. He was mourning the loss of his humanity, convinced that he was a monster who had merely dragged me into his lair.
I looked down at the tablet in my lap. With a few keystrokes, I could see the digital world reacting to the fallout of the Volkov empire. I could see the UNI directors being quietly replaced, the shell companies being dissolved, and the names of the "Collision Project" conspirators being blacklisted. I was the one steering the ship through the storm, while Yuri stood on the deck, waiting for a wave that would never come.
I stood up and walked to him, stepping into the space he tried so hard to keep clear. I didn't reach for his hand this time; I simply leaned my forehead against his back, feeling the rigid tension in his muscles.
"You didn't just save me from the dark, Yuri," I whispered. "You showed me that the dark is just a place where you can see the stars more clearly. If we're ghosts, then let's be ghosts together. But stop waiting for the world to take me back. I'm the one who decides where I go now."
He didn't move, but I felt a shudder go through him. The machine of vengeance was still there, but beneath the armor, the man was finally starting to breathe.
"I don't know how to be anything else," he confessed, his voice breaking.
"Then let me teach you," I said, sliding my arms around his waist. "Because the code is gone, the Volkovs are dead, and for the first time in my life, I'm not looking at a monitor. I'm looking at you."
Outside, the lights of Manhattan flickered to life, a million tiny pulses of energy in a city that never realized it had been saved by a ghost and a machine.