He cleans the wound with something from a small glass bottle that burns considerably more than the cloth did, and I grip the edge of the bench and say nothing because I am absolutely not giving him the satisfaction of watching me flinch. He applies a thin layer of salve, wraps the arm with practiced efficiency, and ties the bandage off without excess.
"There," he says, and sits back on his heels.
He doesn't stand up. He stays there, at eye level, and the fire is behind him now, and the light does something to his face that makes him look less like the man who stood in Council Hall two days ago and more like someone who has been carrying something heavy for a very long time and is getting tired.
"Ryder," I say.
"Don't." His voice is quiet. "Don't ask if I'm all right. I'm not. But I will be."
"I wasn't going to ask if you're all right." I study his face. "I was going to ask what you're not saying."
He's quiet for several seconds. The fire pops. Outside, I can hear Thane's footsteps, slow and irregular, a man walking in circles he doesn't know he's making.
"I had a sister," Ryder says.
The sentence lands like a stone dropped in still water.
"Her name was Mira." He's still crouched in front of me, forearms resting on his knees, and his gaze has dropped to the floor between us. "She was seventeen. She had my mother's coloring and absolutely none of my patience, which wasprobably an improvement over the original model." A pause. "She was training at an outpost when the wraiths came through. They lost three students that day. Mira was one of them."
I don't say anything. He's not done.
"I was supposed to be there," he says. "I was assigned to that outpost rotation. I traded the shift because I had evidence work I thought was more important." His jaw tightens. "It wasn't more important."
"You couldn't have known—"
"No." His voice doesn't rise. It goes flatter, which is worse. "I've heard that. It doesn't change the calculation. If I'd been there, she might have survived. I wasn't there. She didn't." He finally looks up. "Every wraith that comes through a breach since then is a debt I'm paying."
"And me?" I ask. "Is that what I am? Another debt?"
Something moves across his face that I don't have a name for. Raw and unguarded and not at all like the man who walked into my first class and dismantled every illusion I had about this place being survivable.
"No," he says. "You're what I'm terrified of losing."
The fire settles. Outside, Thane's footsteps stop.
"That's the most honest thing you've ever said to me," I tell him.
"Don't make a thing of it."
"I'm not making a thing of it." I lean forward slightly. "I'm noting it. There's a difference."
He looks at me for a long moment, and the bond is open between us in a way I've been trying to describe to myself since the first time I felt it and have never quite managed. It's not warmth exactly, though it runs warm. It's more like the feeling of a room when someone else is already in it. Not alone. That specific absence of alone.
"When that wraith hit you," he says, "and you went down—"
"I got back up."
"I know you did." He exhales slowly. "That's not the part that stays with me."
I reach out and put my uninjured hand on his jaw. His whole body stills, the way it does when I touch him without warning, that particular arrest of a man who has been braced for the world and can't quite process gentleness when it arrives.
"I got back up," I say again, quieter. "I'm still here."
He turns his face slightly into my palm. Just slightly. Just enough.
"Angelic," he says.
"Don't explain it," I tell him. "Don't tell me what you can and can't give, or what the bond means or doesn't mean, or why this is complicated. I know it's complicated. I was there for all of it."
