Page 152 of His Son's Brid
"Look up," Axel says.
I look up.
And I stop breathing.
Oh… my… world.
The sky is moving.
Not the clouds, not a plane, not anything I have a name for immediately — just the sky itself, alive, shifting in long trembling curtains of green that fold and unfurl like something breathing. Pale at the edges where it starts, then deeper, richer, moving toward a center so bright it's almost white. A thread of violet curls along the bottom of one ribbon. Another wave rolls in from the left, slow and enormous, and the green deepens as it passes, darkening toward something closer to teal before fading back again.
My hand goes to my mouth.
Wow.
I knew what they were called. I'd seen the photographs, hundreds of them, on screens and in books and on the walls of travel agencies. I thought I understood what they looked like.
I understood nothing.
Because photographs don't move. They don't breathe. They don't make you feel like the ground beneath you has become irrelevant, like up and down are suggestions, like you are standing at the bottom of something infinite, and the infinite is doing something extraordinary just because it can.
My eyes are burning. I don't blink because I'm terrified to miss a single second.
"A-Axel." I whisper in awe.
"Northern Lights." His voice is low beside me. "Private land. Three hundred acres. We have it until morning."
I can't look at him yet. Can't pull my eyes from the sky. Another ribbon unfurls, this one wider, rolling across the dark like a slow tide, and I make a sound I've never made before — not a word, not a cry, just something that escapes before I can stop it.
He did this.
The thought arrives quietly at first, then louder. He did this. Axel Santego, who runs a criminal empire, has stitches in his side from a knife wound and is handling an active investigation into a mole in his own house, remembered a bucket list I mentioned weeks ago, in passing, in the middle of chaos. He remembered it, found private land, arranged security, transport, and a thermos that I can see sitting at the edge of a blanket someone spread on the grass, and he brought me here.
He brought mehere.
The tears come without permission. I don't wipe them. They're cold on my cheeks immediately, and I don't care, I just stand there with my face tipped up, and my hand still pressed to my mouth, and watch the sky move.
"You said you wanted to see them." Axel's voice is quiet.
"I-I did." My voice is unsteady. "You remembered that?"
"I remember everything you tell me."
That's what breaks me open completely. Not the lights, though they're the most beautiful thing I have ever seen in my life. Not the private land, the convoy, the cold, or the planning. Just those six words, simple and certain, from a man who isn't simple or certain about anything.
I remember everything you tell me.
I turn to him then, finally, and his face in the light of the aurora is something I want to keep. The green moving across his features, that silver hair, the dark eyes watching me with an expression that has no armor in it at all.
I step toward him, take his face in both my hands, and kiss him.
I kiss him the way I've wanted to since the moment I stepped out of the car and realized what he'd done. It’s slow, deep, and says everything I haven't yet found words for. He makes a low sound against my mouth before pulling me in by the waist and kisses me back until I forget the cold completely.
When I pull back, his eyes are still closed for a half second.
"Thank you," I breathe against his mouth.
His eyes open. He grins, slow and warm, that rare genuine smile, and pulls me back in — one hand at my jaw, deliberate, tiltingmy face up — and kisses me again, longer this time, his thumb tracing the line of my cheekbone while the lights drift above us.
