CHAPTER 43

ARIA'S POINT OF VIEW

The world outside our door was a symphony of rebuilding. But here, in the silent gloom of our communal house, with dawn barely peeking through the oiled-skin window, the world shrank to the space of a bed, the scent of pine and leather, and the steady, firm warmth of the man beside me.

Kaiden was asleep. It was a deep, strange sleep, the kind that had been impossible in the war camps and only tentative in the early days of the Valley. One arm was stretched above