I wake up with a lightness in my chest I've never felt before.
Alaskan air filters through the hotel window. Crisp. Clean. Carrying something that feels like a promise. Olivia lies beside me, dark hair splayed across the pillow, still breathing slow and deep.
"Hey." I shake her shoulder. "Wake up. I don't want us to be late for our own honeymoon."
She groans. Pulls the blanket over her head. I'm already up.
I shower. Dress. Scramble eggs. Nothing fancy. By the time I'm done she's dragging her suitcase out of the bedroom, hair still damp, that teasing smile already in place.
"Come on, Clyde." She says my name like it's a joke she's been sitting on all morning. "I thought you didn't want to be late."
We load the car and pull onto an empty highway. The sun climbs. The tundra turns gold and amber. The road stretches ahead like it has no intention of ending.
About an hour in, she turns to me.
"So where are we supposed to be going right now?"
I hit the brakes hard enough that she grabs the dashboard. Sixty miles an hour. Doesn't matter. I whip around and stare at her.
"What did you even pack if you don't know where we're going?"
She bursts out laughing. Full-bodied. The kind of laugh that made me fall for her in the first place. Then she just shrugs and looks back out the window like she hasn't said anything remarkable at all.
I shake my head. Keep driving.
Somewhere in the Yukon we hit a crossroads.
Main highway east. Well-paved. Clearly marked. Then a second option — narrower, rougher, cutting northeast through nothing.
"Take that one," Olivia says.
I glance at it. Then at her. "You sure? That doesn't look like much of a road."
"It's shorter. My boss uses it all the time when he drives from Alaska instead of flying. Trust me."
There's something in the way she says it. Military precision dressed up as casual confidence. I've learned to notice that.
But she's my wife. Four days into being my wife. And I want to make her happy.
I turn onto the narrow path.
"Alright," I say. "But if we end up stuck in the middle of nowhere, you're explaining it to the tow truck driver."
She's already scrolling through playlists. Eminem fills the car. Sharp. Percussive. The wilderness closes in on either side and we slide into an easy rhythm.
"Seriously?" I say after a few songs. "Eminem?"
"What's wrong with Eminem?"
"Nothing, if you're stuck in 2002."
She rolls her eyes and switches to Billie Eilish. The mood shifts darker. More atmospheric. We argue about it good-naturedly, voices rising and falling, the car bouncing along the uneven road. Beautiful out there. Wild and untamed and completely indifferent to us.
Hours pass, That's when she grabs my arm.
"Clyde. Stop the car."
I brake. "What? What's wrong?"
"Look."
She points through her window. Beyond a wrought iron fence, a field of daffodils stretches out as far as I can see. Thousands of them. Maybe millions. Yellow heads bobbing in the breeze like a slow gold wave. Surreal. Impossible this far north. But there.
"Oh my God." Her voice goes soft. "Clyde, we have to go see them. Please?"
I look at the fence. Old. Ornate. Decorative spikes along the top shaped like fleur-de-lis. Pretty, not dangerous. Not if you're careful.
I look at her face.
"Alright," I say. "But if we get arrested for trespassing, you're explaining that too."
She's already out of the car.
She goes over first. Nimble. Six years of service in every movement. Lands on the other side and spins around with her arms wide open.
"Come on, slow poke."
I climb over more carefully. Drop down beside her. The moment my feet hit the ground she grabs my hands and pulls me into the field.
Daffodils surround us. The air smells sweet, almost overwhelming. The only sounds are wind and flowers and her laughing as she spins in slow circles with her face turned up to the sky.
"This is perfect," she says. Eyes bright. Cheeks flushed. "This is absolutely perfect, Clyde."
I pull her close. Wrap both arms around her waist. She's warm and solid and real and this is the first day of the rest of our lives and I feel it right down to my bones.
"Yeah," I say. "It really is."
She looks up at me. The world narrows to just her face. I lean down to kiss her -
The explosion is not thunder.
This comes from nowhere and everywhere at once - a single catastrophic detonation from somewhere away from us in a faraway facality, that punches the air out of existence. The pressure wave hits us before the sound fully registers, a physical wall of force that flattens the daffodils in a rippling circle and slams into my chest like a battering ram.
Olivia's military instincts fire before mine do. She's already turning, already tensing
The fence tears free.
All of it. Every post ripped clean from the ground by the blast pressure. The entire length of ornate wrought iron lifts into the air and spins, those decorative fleur-de-lis spikes that were harmless ten seconds ago now moving at a speed that makes them something else entirely. Something that has no name in peacetime.
I open my mouth to shout her name.
The fence arrives first.
It takes her at the neck, the waist, and the legs simultaneously — three contact points across the full length of her body in a single terrible instant. The spikes don't slow. The momentum doesn't negotiate. The fence passes through her and continues its arc and what it leaves behind is not Olivia anymore.
Three pieces.
Her upper body pitches forward, neck severed clean at the third vertebra, and as it falls her intestines — already torn free at the waist, still attached by membrane and gravity — drag behind it in a wet gray rope. They slap across her own face as her torso hits the ground. Her cheek presses into the daffodils. The intestines pile across her shoulders and the back of her head like something obscene, coiling in the dirt, steam rising faintly from the exposed warmth of her insides meeting Yukon air.
Her midsection collapses where it stood. The cavity has been opened fully — ribs splayed outward, organs catching the afternoon light in shades that have no place in sunlight. Her liver hits the ground first. Dense. Dark red. It bounces once. Her stomach follows, deflating as it lands, releasing a smell that reaches me a full second later and nearly puts me on my knees before the sight of her already has. Her lungs collapse inward on themselves, two pale fists of tissue folding flat against the soil.
Her heart lands last. Falls from the cavity like something dropped. Hits the earth and keeps going — one contraction, two, three — each beat pumping a thin jet of blood into the daffodil roots before the rhythm slows and stops and the flowers drink it in without comment.
Her legs are a meter away. Still kneeling. The nerves haven't gotten the message. They fire anyway, twitching against the ground, her feet pressing into the soil like she's still trying to push herself upright, still trying to run from something that finished three seconds ago.
The daffodils are red.
Not yellow anymore. Red. Soaked through. The arterial spray has fanned outward in long arcing lines from her severed neck and painted everything in a radius of four meters. The petals hold the blood in their cups. It drips from stem to stem in a slow curtain.
I'm on my knees and I don't know when that happened.
My shoulder and my leg. Something wrong with my limbs. I look down and see bone — white and gleaming, jutting from the torn meat of my arm and leg where a spike caught me on its way through. Blood runs in steady sheets down my side. Too much. Too fast.
"Olivia..."
Her name. That's all I have. I say it on a loop, voice cracking into nothing, reaching for the one part of her that still looks like her. Her face. Already cooling. Eyes open. Staring at the daffodils pressed against her cheek, seeing none of them. Whatever was behind those eyes ten seconds ago — the joy, the spinning, the this is perfect — it's gone.
Just gone.
My last breath is a wet gurgle.
My last thought is her laugh. The way it sounded in the car. Light. Free. Full of everything.
Then nothing.
Just darkness.
Just the end.
The daffodils sway in the wind, painted red, completely indifferent.