"Tonight."
Evran turns and walks out of the stone gardens. His stride is calm, his posture relaxed, his face pleasant and composed and revealing nothing of the storm that lives behind it.
His heart is pounding so hard he can feel it in his teeth.
He makes it through the courtyard, through the corridor, around the corner, and then he stops and presses his back against the wall and closes his eyes and breathes.
The fury is still there, bright and clean and cold. It does not feel the way he expected fury to feel, does not feel wild or uncontrolled or dangerous. It feels precise. It feels useful. It feels like the thing that is going to carry him through tonight and out the other side with the evidence in his hands and his husband's life secured.
He opens his eyes. He pushes off the wall. He walks to Bran's room and knocks.
There are plans to finalize.
Chapter 18
When Evran gets back to the bedroom, Vaike is already there.
He is standing by the fireplace.
Not sitting, not resting, not lying in the bed where the medic told him to be. Standing, one hand braced on the mantel, the other hanging loose at his side. The fire is lit and burning low, its orange light catching the angles of his face, the strong jaw, the dark brow, the stitched wound at his temple, and casting the rest of him in deep shadow. He is dressed in his tunic and trousers, the injured shoulder held with a stiffness he's trying to hide, and he is looking at the fire.
He does not look up when Evran enters.
Something is wrong.
Evran feels it immediately, the air in the room, the tension in Vaike's spine, the heaviness that has settled over the space. This is not the controlled, deliberate stillness that Vaike carries when he is thinking or when he is angry or when he is waiting for the right moment to speak. This is the stillness of carryingsomething he doesn't want to carry, and the weight of it is pressing him down.
"You should be sitting," Evran says. He closes the door behind him and moves into the room, his voice light, careful. "Is your head bothering you?"
Vaike doesn't answer.
Evran stops. The lightness drains from his voice, replaced by something tighter. "Vaike?"
Nothing. The fire crackles. Vaike's hand on the mantel is steady, his knuckles pale against the dark wood.
Evran crosses the room and reaches out and touches Vaike's elbow, gently, the way you touch someone who might startle, and says, "Talk to me. What's wrong?"
Vaike finally seems to notice him. His head turns, slowly, and his dark eyes find Evran's face. But his expression does not soften, does not ease or warm or shift into the tenderness that it always, always, does when he looks at Evran. It stays hard, guarded, the mask of the Warlord locked firmly in place, and behind it something that makes the cold knot beneath Evran's ribs clench tight.
Worry claws up Evran's throat.
Vaike turns from the fireplace and faces Evran fully, and the firelight is behind him now, throwing his features into shadow, making him look larger and darker and more imposing than he usually does in this room, in their space, in the place where the Warlord is supposed to be put away and only the man remains.
He reaches out and takes Evran's face in his hands.
Both hands. Those strong, familiar hands, the ones that have held him through nightmares and washed blood from his skin and traced patterns on his body in the dark. The ones that carved beads from stone and wove them into his hair. The ones that have never, not once in six months, touched him with anything other than absolute tenderness.
They cup his jaw. They tilt his face up. They hold him, steady and firm, and Vaike's eyes search his with an intensity that is almost painful.
"I've been hearing things the last few days," Vaike says.
His voice is low, controlled, but there is a current beneath it, a tremor, barely perceptible, holding something back through sheer force of will. It is the most uncertain Evran has ever heard him sound, and the wrongness of it, the fundamental wrongness of Vaike being uncertain about anything, makes Evran's stomach drop.
"Things that make me uneasy," Vaike continues, his thumbs pressing against Evran's cheekbones. "Things that make it difficult to sleep."
Evran's heart is beating so hard he's certain Vaike can feel it through his jaw. His mind races, what did he hear, who told him, how much does he know, and he thinks about Torsten and the ale room and the stone gardens and the kiss at the stable and the walk through the stronghold and every single moment of the last week where he has been somewhere he shouldn't have been, doing something he shouldn't have been doing, building a web of lies and half-truths that he always knew, always knew, would eventually reach Vaike's ears.
He didn't think it would be tonight. He didn't think he'd have to face this now, hours before the plan, hours before all of it comes together or falls apart.
