Chapter 11
CHAPTER ELEVEN
She woke from the dream with her hand pressed flat to her sternum, her fingers trembling against the sudden heat of her skin, and the fire burned low. The embers cast a fitful, orange glow that seemed to pulse with her own frantic heartbeat.
The dream left nothing useful behind, no image she could name, only the residue of it.
A sense of heat and hands, and the particular quality of being held.
Then the cold of the pillow and the dark of the room and her own heartbeat under her palm, too fast for a woman who had only been sleeping.
The silence of the keep pressed in on her, and she lay still for a moment, waiting for the phantom touch to fade.
She counted her breath the way she counted everything, measured it back to something she could use.
The boy. Check the boy.
She had checked him at midnight, and his breathing had been steady. The new rhythm he was learning was less effortful than the one he'd been born into. She felt a small, fierce spark of pride at the thought, then caught herself feeling it, and didn't know what to do with that either.
But it was something to do with her hands.
Something that had nothing to do with the dream or with the man who'd stood at a well in the afternoon light and called it a mistake. The memory of his voice, cool and dismissing, made her jaw tighten as she sat up.
She pulled on her shawl, the wool rough against her shoulders, took the candle, and went down the corridor. The flame flickered wildly in the draft, casting her shadow long and distorted against the stone.
The door to James's room was already open.
She stopped in the doorway, her breath catching in her throat.
Anthony sat in the chair beside the bed. Not straight, not alert. His elbows on his knees, his head bowed forward slightly, not sleeping but close to it. His shoulders were slumped, the heavy weight of the day, or perhaps the years, seeming to pull at him.
This is what he looks like when no one is watchin'.
The thought arrived before she could stop it. She almost stepped back into the corridor with it.
The posture of a man who had surrendered to exhaustion without quite conceding to rest. The flickering candlelight traced the sharp line of his profile, usually so severe, now softened by the shadows of fatigue.
His hand lay on the edge of the mattress beside James's blanket.
Not on it. Beside it. An inch from the boy's arm, and she understood immediately that it had been there a long time.
The sight sent a sudden, sharp ache through her chest, a feeling so physical she nearly stepped back.
Protecting without claiming comfort.
The thought arrived without her asking for it, and she could not send it back. She watched the way his fingers twitched once, a subconscious reach that he suppressed even in his half-sleep.
She had seen a hundred patients' kin sit this way. She had never once felt it like this.
The fire had burned to embers.
In the low red light, his face held nothing it held during daylight. No command in it. No wall. Just a man in a chair beside a child's bed in the small hours, keeping a watch no one had asked him to keep.
James's chest rose. Fell. Rose again, at its new pace. Steadier, more trusting. She focused on that sound, grounding herself in the boy's recovery.
He's been sittin' here listenin' to it.
Learnin' what better sounds like.
Her chest felt admiration. It was a heavy, complicated feeling that made her throat feel tight.
She should go back. She had seen what she came to see, the boy was well, the breathing held.
She took one step forward instead, and her candle moved, and the light shifted across the room. The floorboard beneath her foot gave a treacherous, high-pitched groan.
The floorboard.
He heard it before he saw the light. The third board from the doorway, the one that had needed fixing for a few months, and he kept forgetting because nothing in his life gave him cause to notice floorboards at three in the morning.
The sound acted like a brand pressed to the back of his neck, hot and immediate, snapping him upright before he'd decided to move.
He was upright before he'd decided to move. His heart hammered against his ribs, a frantic rhythm he fought to stifle.
His spine straightened.
He felt his expression do what it always did. Close over itself the way a fist closed, fast and practiced, the instinct of a man who had learned early that being caught unguarded was another word for being caught weak. He felt the skin tighten around his eyes, the cold mask sliding back into place.
She stood in the doorway with a candle and her hair loose and her shawl pulled tight and the sleep still in her eyes.
The sight of her—soft-edged and glowing in the candlelight—made his breath hitch.
She was looking at him the way she looked at everything, like she was already deciding what it meant.
How long was she standing there?
He didn't ask it. Asking would confirm there was something worth asking about. He cleared his throat, the sound rough and grating in the silence.
"Ye should sleep," he said. His voice came out rougher than he intended. He didn't fix it.
"So should ye."
He had no answer to that, so he gave none. He merely shifted his weight, his eyes tracking the way the candlelight danced in her red hair.
She crossed to the far side of James's bed without waiting for permission. She never waited for permission; he had stopped expecting it. He watched her move, his gaze lingering on the way the shawl slipped slightly from her shoulder.
She pressed two fingers to the inside of the boy's wrist. Her eyes went to James's face, then to his chest, then she straightened and looked across the bed at him. Her eyes were dark and searching, and he found he couldn't look away.
"He's well," she said.
"Aye." He let out a slow, cautious breath.
She smoothed the edge of James's blanket. The gesture was unnecessary. He noticed that she did it anyway. Her fingers were pale against the dark wool, her touch lingering.
"Ye do this often," she said.
Not a question.
Every night since the fire.
Every night for six years, at least once, sometimes twice.
Every night I lie in that room at the end of this corridor and listen for the sound of him breathin' wrong, and when I hear it, I come, and I sit until he settles.
"He has bad nights," he said. He felt the familiar knot of anxiety tighten in his stomach.
"He isnae havin' one tonight."
"Nay," he said. He looked down at the boy, his jaw working. "He isnae."
The fire shifted, a soft collapse of ember. Outside the narrow window, the Highland dark was complete. No wind, no sound, just the cold pressing itself against the glass as it had done every winter of his life. The silence between them felt heavy, charged with things unsaid.
"The first week I was here," she said, low enough not to disturb James, "I heard footsteps in this corridor every night. I thought it was the keep settlin'."
He said nothing. He kept his gaze fixed on the dying fire, his pulse thrumming in his ears.
"It wasnae the keep settlin'," she said.
He looked at the boy. At the line of James's shoulder under the blanket.
The dark hair damp at the temples, the small face that carried his brother's mouth and his mother's eyes, and something that was entirely and stubbornly its own.
He felt a wave of fierce, protective love rise in him, nearly choking him.
"How long has he had the bad nights?" she asked.
He weighed the question.
It wasn't a clinical question. She had all the clinical information she needed, she'd asked the right questions in the first week, and he'd answered them. This was something else. He could feel her waiting, her presence a warm weight in the room.
"Since he could walk," he said. "He'd wake coughin' and couldnae settle on his own. The old healer used to sit with him until it passed." He kept his eyes on James. "She's gone now." The words felt heavy, like stones he was dropping into a deep well.
"So ye sit."
"Someone has to." He shrugged, a jerky movement that betrayed his unease.
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 candlelight softened 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 to everything 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.
He looked at her for one more heartbeat. One heartbeat too many, he already knew it. Then he stepped past her, reached back, and pulled the door to James's room gently closed between them.
He held the handle a moment on his side of it. His forehead pressed against the cool wood, his eyes closed tight.
Then he let go, and walked the length of the corridor to his room, and did not look back, and lay down on top of the covers fully dressed and stared at the ceiling of his own room and thought about the way she had not stepped back. The silence of his room felt louder than ever.
He was still thinking about it when the grey of dawn came through the window. His heart was still beating a rhythm that had nothing to do with sleep, and the tension under his skin burned in places that had been silent so long he'd forgotten they could.