“Emily?” he called, his eyes adjusting to the candlelight.
Her figure slowly came into focus, and he saw her extend her hand toward him.
“Daenae!” she warned, holding Maggie in one hand as she warned him back. “Daenae come any closer. Ye’ll hurt yerself.”
Kaden’s brow furrowed, the thrill giving way to confusion as he slowly put the pieces together. There was a broken glass on the floor beside the bed and a mess of white milk around the shards.
“Maggie knocked over the glass while kicking in her sleep. I daenae want her to step on any of the glass shards,” Emily warned.
Kaden glanced at the glass and then back at his own bare feet and realized that he could have gotten hurt. Even seeing the issue directly in front of him, he couldn’t shrug off the tension in his shoulders. It was like his body was in the castle, standing in Emily’s bedroom, near her bed, but his mind was right back in that cell.
Countless nights interrupted by the changing of the guards, who would knock on his cell door at all hours, banging randomly and shouting just so that he couldn’t sleep.
It had been their favorite pastime. They would hit the bars with the handles of their swords or run their blades along the bars of the single window he had. Sometimes they did it to amuse themselves, other times to let him know that he needed to be awake so that they could have more fun torturing him.
Kaden was only vaguely aware of the cold sweat on his skin as he stared at Emily and Maggie.
“Kaden?” Emily set Maggie on the far side of the bed. “I am unharmed. Maggie is unharmed…”
Her voice sounded very far away, as if she were speaking to him from the end of a long tunnel. He was vaguely aware that she was scooting across the bed and moving closer to him, her hands outstretched. She gasped slightly as she drew closer to him, but kept her eyes on his face instead of his bare chest.
He hadn’t thought to dress properly before rushing out of the room to ensure that she was all right.
“I only wanted to keep her from hurting her paws. I didnae mean to frighten ye… Kaden?”
Emily hovered on the edge of the bed, brushing his chest with her fingertips before flattening her palm over his heart. Even this close, her visage was blurry.
“I am sorry,” she murmured.
Kaden’s hand lifted to cover hers where it rested on his chest. He could see it, but he couldn’t feel it touching him. His throat felt overly dry, and the room still threatened to spin.
“It is all right…” Emily soothed as she rose from the bed, her shift nearly translucent in the candlelight.
She lifted his free hand and placed it over her heart so that he might feel the steady beat and know that she was unharmed.
It worked.
The instant dread and loop of memories that threatened to pull him under faded until the scene in front of him felt less like a hazy dream and more like reality.
Emily’s figure came more into focus, and he tried to pull his hands away from her, but this time she forced him to stay still.
“Where did ye go?”
Her beautiful eyes were wide and glossy as they looked up at him, and he knew that he had to make a choice. He could either choose to trust her and tell her the truth that he had never breathed to another living soul, or he could brush it off as if it were nothing and call for the servants to fetch her a fresh glass of milk and clean up the mess.
He knew which of the two was the more comfortable option; there was certainly no denying that.
Every part of her wanted to beg Kaden to tell her the truth, to open up to her. She wouldn’t go anywhere if he were willing to do that.
There was no denying that the limited view that she had of his skin here in the dim light was… well, shocking. She could feel the scar tissue under the tips of her fingers, the way his skin had been disfigured by poor treatment, and the way he had tried his best to compensate for it. He was such a large man; learning how to be functional again had to have been very painful for him.
He was so much stronger than others gave him credit for, and she didn’t think that had anything to do with his battle acumen.
“The noises in the night…” Kaden trailed off and swallowed hard. “Sometimes, there are certain things that take me back, nay matter how hard I try to ignore them or make it better.”
Emily kept quiet so that he would have the freedom to say what he wanted. She didn’t pull her hand away, nor did she allow him to move away from her while he spoke. She didn’t want him to feel ashamed, not with her.
“Banging on the bars, sometimes quickly followed by the bite of a whip,” he said numbly.
