A silence. Then, "Anthony."
He looked at her.
Her face in the near-dark was quiet, stripped of the dry guard she kept on it during daylight hours. The candlelightsoftened the angles of her face, making her look younger, more vulnerable. Just her face, present, looking at him directly the way she always did and the way he had never quite managed to become accustomed to.
"He's goin' to have more good nights than bad ones," she said. "That's nae a promise. It's evidence. His lungs are strengthenin'. Another month of treatment and the bad nights will be fewer. Two months and they'll be rare." She held his gaze. Her eyes were steady, offering a hope he was terrified to take. "I'm telling ye so ye can sleep."
Something moved in his chest that he didn't have a word for and wasn't going to look for. It was a strange, terrifying loosening of a knot he'd kept tight for years.
"I ken ye're tellin' the truth," he said. "That isnae what keeps me awake." He watched her absorb that, her throat moving as she swallowed.
He watched her absorb that. Watched her decide not to push it. That restraint, coming from her, cost something. He could see it in the small stillness that moved through her before she let it go. Her shoulders dropped a fraction, a quiet surrender to the moment.
He rose from the chair, quietly, careful not to disturb the boy.
Old habit. Six years of rising from this same chair in the small hours had made the movement automatic. Slow, weight shifted,no sudden sounds. He felt the stiffness in his joints, the cold of the room finally biting through.
He moved to the door.
She followed.
He stopped in the doorway. She stopped a half-step behind him, and he was aware of her in the precise, inconvenient way he was always aware of her. The air between them felt thin, heated.
The candle in her hand throwing light across the corridor wall, her shawl loose at one shoulder, her presence at his back a specific and catalogued warmth.
He turned.
Daenae look at her.
Look at the corridor. Look at the floor. Look at literally anything that isnae her face at three in the mornin' with her hair down and the sleep still in her eyes.
He looked at her.
The loosened fall of her hair. The softness of sleep left in the eyes that spent their daylight hours reading him. The way she stood. Straight, unhurried, shawl slipping at the shoulder, not moving back, looking at him with the same directness she brought toeverything and never seemed to consider withdrawing. He felt a sudden, sharp pull in his gut, a yearning he couldn't name.
Something tightened sharply in his chest. Warm and dangerous.
A pull he did not trust and had no good reason to resist except every reason he'd built for himself over six years, and they were, at three in the morning, in a dark corridor, with her looking at him like that, insufficient. He could see the pulse jumping in the hollow of her throat.
Back away.
Now. The same as the well.
Back away and call it sense, and go to your room and sleep.
He stepped forward instead.
Close enough that her warmth brushed him. A thin shawl, a tallow candle, and two feet of cold corridor air. Somehow, none of that was enough to constitute a proper distance. He could hear the hitch in her breath.
Her chin came up slightly. She didn't step back.
Of course, she doesnae step back.
"Go to sleep, Catriona," he said quietly. His voice was a low rumble, vibrating in the small space between them.
"Ye first," she said. Her voice was steady, but her eyes were wide, dark with something he didn't dare identify.
His mouth moved before he caught it. A ghost of a smile, or perhaps a grimace of pain.
