Chapter Seventeen Half a Month
Chapter Seventeen: Half a Month
Lysandra
The first thing I'm aware of is that I can't breathe.
Not in any alarming way. In the way of: something is wrapped around me from three directions and my face is partially against a warm shoulder and there is a forearm the approximate weight and density of structural steel locked across my ribs.
I open one eye.
Cassian is asleep. Deeply, unself-consciously asleep, both his legs tangled through mine, one arm pinning my waist with a grip that would be excessive even if he were awake.
He takes up approximately two-thirds of this bed. The remaining third is what he has allocated to me.
He's been coming home late. I noticed it four days ago, then three, then last night past midnight. The Gideon and Lilian's case, I assumed. Some things don't resolve cleanly.
I remember the second afternoon in this apartment. He came back, moved around the kitchen with elaborate casualness for nearly two hours, rearranged things that didn't need rearranging, made coffee he didn't drink.
Then he sat down across from me and said, with the careful neutrality of someone delivering news they aren't sure how to land: that he'd had them both arrested.
Then he looked at me the way a defendant looks at a judge.
I sighed. "Good. I hope you throw the book at them."
He laughed. It surprised him, I think. The laugh came out before he could do anything about it.
I try, carefully, to shift onto my back.
His arm tightens.
"Where are you going."
It's not a question. His eyes are still closed.
He found the words without surfacing, without loosening a single point of contact, following the scent of me the way he does when he wants something and is still ninety percent unconscious.
"It's morning," I say. "I'd like to get up."
His mouth finds my ear with an accuracy that has no business existing in someone who is allegedly asleep. My whole side goes warm.
"It's early." His voice is rough and low and entirely too pleased with itself. "One more time."
"Cassian—"
He rolls, and I lose the argument.
When I actually wake up, the sun has moved past the window entirely. The clock on the nightstand says 11:47.
The bed beside me is empty.
His side still holds the warmth and the shape of him, but the man himself is gone — back to the Alliance building, probably, handling whatever requires the chief justice's attention on a Wednesday morning, looking exactly as composed and terrifying as he always does.
Carrying absolutely none of the evidence of the last twelve hours anywhere on his face.
I am carrying all of it.
I walk into the bathroom and turn on the light and look at myself in the mirror for a moment.
I count. I stop counting.
There is a turtleneck on the bed. I put it on and look back at the mirror again. It does its best.
Half a month, I think, pulling the collar of the turtleneck as high as it will go. From the day the bond formed. Every single day.
He acts like a wolf who has been starving for years and recently discovered that the food is not going anywhere, and is therefore making up for lost time. Which is, technically, accurate.
That does not mean I have to accept it without comment.
Tonight, we are having a conversation about moderation.
***
The hallway between our apartments is eight steps long.
Cassian bought the unit next door seven days ago. I don't know exactly when he arranged it. Sometime in the first few days, before I had figured out how to arrange my own future.
I came out of the bedroom one afternoon and Nessa was sitting on his couch. My mother was in the guest room. There was a medical team setting up equipment in the unit next door.
Cassian was on the phone, looking like he'd simply handled the logistics of importing someone's entire household and found it unremarkable.
He ended the call when he saw me. He pulled me in without a word, one arm around me, and said it quietly against my ear.
"I know what happened four years ago. I know what you were protecting. It won't happen again."
I pressed the doorbell at 12:08.
Nessa opens the door, takes one look at me, and the expression on her face goes immediately wrong. Not wrong like something is the matter. Wrong like she's trying very hard not to smile and not quite managing it.
"You're up," she says, in the voice of someone who has been waiting to say exactly this.
"I'm up."
"Cassian left specific instructions." She folds her hands in front of her, composing herself.
"He asked me — he was very thorough about this — not to knock on the door. He said you were tired and needed the rest." She pauses. "He used the word 'exhausted.' He was very concerned."
The heat hits my face so fast I can feel it in my ears.
"He said that."
"In those words."
"To you."
"To both of us." She gestures past her shoulder. My mother is at the stove.
I am going to have an additional conversation with Cassian tonight about what constitutes private information.
I sit down at the table before my face returns to normal.
My mother sets a bowl of soup in front of me — real soup, the kind she used to make when I was small, with the ingredients she only uses when she's cooking for someone she loves.
Under the Alliance medical team's care, she can walk on her own now. Slowly, still, and not far. But she walked from the stove to the table under her own power and I watched every step.
The television is on in the living room, the midday news cycling through.
I'm halfway through the soup when the broadcast shifts.
"— the Alliance Supreme Court has issued its final ruling in the Alden pharmaceutical case.
Former pack lord Alden has been sentenced to death, sentence to be carried out immediately, following confirmation of his role in the unauthorized development and distribution of substances targeting werewolf biology—"
I set my spoon down.
"— Alden's current wife has been stripped of all titles and assets and sentenced to exile in the northern wastelands, effective immediately.
Additionally, reigning pack lord Gideon and members of his household face suspension of all pack jurisdictional authority pending full Alliance investigation into charges of harboring fugitives and participation in illegal substance distribution—"
The broadcast moves on.
The dining room goes quiet.
I turn to look at my mother, carefully.
She doesn't look up from her own bowl. She lifts another ladle of soup, reaches across the table, and adds it to mine without asking. Then she picks up her own spoon again.
"Eat," she says. "While it's hot."
I watch her.
Her face is clear. Not numb, not suppressed. Clear, the way a sky looks after weather has finished passing through it.
She has known for a long time, I think, that she was never going to feel what other women feel about the men who left them. She made her peace with that somewhere along the way, quietly, without asking anyone to help her carry it.
She's not carrying it anymore.
She looks up from her bowl and catches me staring.
"What?" She sets her spoon down and takes my hand in both of hers, patting it twice. "I told you to eat."
I eat.
She watches me for a moment, and then her expression does something that I have to look at twice to be sure I'm reading correctly.
She glances at my midsection.
"Get your strength back properly," she says. "You and Cassian. Don't wait too long."
"Mom."
"I'm just saying." She's already picking her spoon back up, entirely unbothered. "I'm not getting younger. I'd like to meet my grandchildren while I still have good knees."
"Mom."
"The soup is getting cold."
Nessa, from the kitchen doorway, makes a sound that is definitely not a laugh.
I pull my mother's hand toward me and hold it, and I can't find words for a moment, which doesn't happen to me often. Out the window, the sun is sitting high and mild over the city.
The soup is hot. My mother's hand is warm.
"Mom." My voice comes out smaller than I mean it to. "I'm really glad you're here."
She squeezes my hand once.
"Of course I am." She sounds genuinely puzzled by the emotion, which is exactly like her. "Now drink the soup. All of it."
I drink the soup.
It's the first afternoon in these years that doesn't weigh anything at all.