The sympathy I feel is real and enormous and has nowhere to go. The man she’s reaching for stopped existing the day he fell in love with someone else.
“Vitals are good,” Dalton says, not looking up. “Whatever he did to her, it took. She’s stable. Stronger than she should be, for the shape she’s in.” He straightens. “I can’t tell you what she is. That’s going to take longer than tonight.”
Dalton steps back and lets me look at her properly. She’s too thin. The gray shadow of starvation sits in the veins at her wrists and her throat, the mark our kind carries when the blood comes measured. The last time I saw it was Simone.
I take it in piece by piece until I get to how she’s sleeping. Curled small, at the edge of the mattress, taking up as little of the bed as a body can, in a room where there’s nobody left to make herself small for.
That’s where the assessing stops. I turned her to spare her one slow death and I handed her to a slower one, and he built every year of the slowness on purpose.
I’ve catalogued atrocities, and hers is the first one I can’t make myself finish.
“Then I’ll leave her to you.” Command voice. The register that costs nothing. “She doesn’t leave this wing without my word. She’snot restrained beyond the door unless she gives you cause. And someone pages me the moment she’s lucid enough to talk.”
“Maximus.” Elena, quiet, in the register she’s earned telling me truths I didn’t want to hear. “Are you all right.”
I look at the woman on the bed, back in the world when she shouldn’t be, the guilt reorganized around her living body and somehow heavier alive than it ever was dead.
“No,” I tell Elena. “But it isn’t a thing you can treat. Page me when she wakes.”
The compound’sroutine shifts around the new presence. The medical wing runs extra shifts. Dalton’s reports land on my desk. The staff who saw Catherine arrive, sedated and carried on a stretcher by wolves who handled her carefully, have been talking, and the talk hasn’t settled into a shape yet.
I let the gossip run until it settles. The truth underneath it is simple enough. A woman we thought was dead is alive, and the man who kept her didn’t keep her for her company. Whether he meant us to find her, I can’t answer yet. What she’s for, I can’t answer yet. So she stays contained, and watched, and I wait for Konstantin’s next move knowing I may not recognize it when it comes.
I don’t go to the conference room. There’s work, and there’s always work, and a younger version of me would have buried himself in it until dawn rather than feel any of this. I don’t go back to the medical wing to sit with the woman I’ve spent my life grieving, though some decent broken part of me wants to, the part that has owed her a vigil since the night I failed to give her one.
I go to our quarters. To Celeste.
The shutters are open. They have not been closed since thesprings, and the dark outside is going gray at its edge, the first warning of a dawn that no longer drives me under, and the light reaches the bed where my wife is sleeping.
She isn’t fully asleep. She rarely is, the nights I come in late off a fight that marked me. I can feel her surface as I come in, the bond shifting from rest to attention, and she doesn’t turn over and she doesn’t ask. She came out of that sealed room ahead of me. She’s the one who gave me the name. She doesn’t ask for words.
I take off the gear. I wash off the blood. I lie down behind her, and I pull her closer, and I let the bond come fully open for the first time since the corridor.
Everything pours through it. The grief I shaped my life around, and Catherine alive at the far end of it, reaching for a man who no longer exists, and I can’t be the one to comfort her. I don’t have to find words. The bond carries all of it, and Celeste takes it without flinching and without trying to fix anything, and shared between us it weighs what one person can carry.
She puts her hand over mine. Her skin is warm under my palm, warmer than it has any right to be, the two lives she’s carrying rising through her into me where I’m always, constitutionally, cold. She is warm. She is here, and not for anyone’s use, and the heat of her pouring into my cold hand over the children we made in the middle of a war is the one sure thing tonight.
“You came to me first,” she says into the gray.
“I’ll always come to you first.” The only vow I’ve ever made that cost me nothing to keep.
She’s quiet a moment. Then she says, dry, in the voice that has pulled me back into my own body more times than I’ve told her, “You’re doing the thing where you lie very still and think you’re being subtle.”
“I am being subtle.”
“You’re radiating. I can feel you cataloging me. Counting myheartbeats like you’re checking they’re all there.” A beat. Her hand tightens over mine. “How many?”
“Four.”
Hers. Mine, which the bond keeps in time with it. And the two small fast ones folded so close inside her own that no instrument found them for months and I’d know them now through anything. The two who tore a crossbow bolt out of the air behind their mother’s back tonight.
“Four heartbeats. I check every time. I’m going to check every time for the rest of my life and you’re going to have to learn to sleep through it.”
She turns, finally, in the circle of my arm, her face an inch from mine in the graying dark.
“You’re doing three impossible things at once,” I say. “Carrying the twins. Keeping me standing. Lying here in the middle of a war and not breaking under any of it. I grieved Catherine my whole life. I built who I am around losing her. And tonight I don’t know how to hold what’s down that hall and what’s in my arms in the same head.”
Her eyes move over my face.
