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Rea’s hand in his, he would surely have stumbled, have slumped to the ground to never get up, but even as his steps faltered, his sister’s voice never faltered.
    “No, Mikail. You owe it to Isa to try.”
    Mik wanted to scream. His place was with Isa, but as silent sobs tore through his chest, somehow, his legs kept moving.
    Rea was right. Isa wanted him to live.
    Numbness washed over him as the mountain legends in his head became true and the jagged peaks concealed their flight from the city. The feeling remained as they kept moving through the dense, green forest and covertly crossed the Albanian border.
    Doric was waiting for them at the smuggler’s meeting point. He took them into his home, fed them and tended the wounds they hadn’t noticed on their exhausted bodies. They huddled by the fire and listened as the BBC world service reported the siege of Pristina and the massacre of thousands of the city’s men. Old men right down to infant boys, no mercy had been shown. Mik wept for the loss of his beloved mother, his father, his uncles and cousins, but it was later, when Doric told them of the death of an unnamed American civilian that his heart truly broke in two.
    Isa was no civilian. He was a solider, the most secret kind of soldier, but there was no doubt in Mik’s mind that the body hung from the city walls was that of the only man he’d ever loved. Isa had made the ultimate sacrifice so Mik could live, but as grief overwhelmed him, the pain was so sharp he could barely breathe, and his life, for all intents and purposes, had come to an end.
     

Chapter Seven
     
     
    Doric offered Mik and what remained of his family refuge, and with Isa dead, Mik saw no viable reason to continue their intended flight to Greece. The trio of young Kosovan’s remained in Albania, taking their summers in the crisp air of the mountains and their winters concealed under the heavy blanket of the forest.
    Leka and Rea grew ever closer as time passed. The first autumn after they fled their motherland, Doric’s wife succumbed to her ailing heart. Mik’s nephew was born just hours later. Doric outlived Rita by mere months, and when his body had been laid to rest, Mik left Leka and Rea to their life in the forest and retreated to the cabin in the mountains. Rea and Leka were happy, and it was all he had ever wanted for each of them, but seeing them together made him bitter. He wanted to scream at them. Tear them apart. There was nothing that could ever fill the void Isa had left, and yet Mik still lived on, whether he wanted to or not. How was that fair?
    For long months, he struggled to feel anything beyond the suffocating fog of depression. He couldn’t eat or sleep. He barely moved from his bed. His body and mind seemed to shut down. Inside and out, he felt broken. Rea and Leka did what they could. They traveled up the mountain when the weather allowed, fed him broth and built him fires. Without them, he surely would have frozen to death that first winter.
    But he didn’t. Somehow, he lived on.
    A year after their escape, a package reached the postal office of the small hamlet a few miles from the forest lodge. It was addressed to Doric but Mik opened it anyway. Inexplicably, it contained his mother’s wedding jewellery and his father’s signet ring. With a heavy heart, he slipped Artan’s ring onto his finger and set aside Klea’s gems for Rea. He reached into the remains of the package for what appeared to be a peaked bundle of cloth. It wasn’t until he turned the soft material over in his hands that he realized what he held.
    It was Isa’s baseball cap, the grubby, shapeless hat he’d worn to conceal his poorly dyed hair.
    Mik sank to the ground as new pain flared in his chest. How was that possible? It couldn’t be, he had to be wrong, but as he raised the hat to his face and inhaled the faint smell of spicy smoke, he knew he wasn’t. He’d recognize the scent of his lost love until his own heart stopped