Chapter 23
"You're bleeding," Ryder says.
We're barely through the door of the abandoned house before he's pointing it out. Not a request. Not a question. Just the flat statement of a man who has decided he's going to deal with it whether I want him to or not.
"I know," I say. "It's fine."
"Show me."
"I said it's fine."
He crosses the room in four steps and takes my wrist, turning my arm over. There's a gash along my forearm where the wraith's cold edge caught me when I went down. I'd forgotten about it. The adrenaline has a way of burying the smaller damage until everything else quiets down.
"Sit," he says.
"You're not my professor right now."
"No," he agrees. "I'm the person who watched you absorb enough power to close a Veil breach and then take a direct wraith hit, and now I'm telling you to sit down before you fall down."
I sit.
The house is a skeleton of what it was. Stone walls, a fireplace that still draws, two rooms, no furniture except a wooden bench along one wall that probably held tools before whoever owned this place abandoned it.
Thane and Caspian stayed outside. I heard them stop at the threshold, some wordless agreement between the two of them that wasn't mine to be part of.
The door is closed now. The fire Ryder lit ten minutes ago is the only light, and it throws long shadows across the stone floor.
He crouches in front of me, and he has a cloth and the small kit he carries that I've seen him use exactly twice before. He presses the cloth against the gash without preamble, and it stings enough that I pull a breath through my teeth.
"Hold that," he says, and puts my other hand over the cloth. Then he opens the kit and starts sorting through it with the efficiency of someone who has done field wound care more times than he can count.
"You don't have to do this," I say.
"I know."
That's all he says. He takes over holding the cloth himself, pressure steady, and his hands are careful in a way that has no performance in it. No audience. Just careful.
I watch his face while he works. The firelight catches the sharp cut of his jaw, the tension he carries between his brows that I used to read as contempt and have since learned is something else entirely.
He's not looking at me. He's looking at my arm, at what he's doing, and there's a focus in it that feels almost like the bond does when it's open.
Present and warm and impossible to dismiss.
"You're going to lecture me," I say. "About pulling from the anchor stone."
"No." He lifts the cloth and checks the wound, then presses it down again. "You closed the breach. I'm not going to lecture you about results."
"But?"
"But nothing." He glances up briefly. "I told you to sit. You sat. We're making progress."
I almost smile. I don't let him see it.
He cleans the wound with something from a small glass bottle that burns considerably more than the cloth did, and I grip the edge of the bench and say nothing because I am absolutely not giving him the satisfaction of watching me flinch.
He applies a thin layer of salve, wraps the arm with practiced efficiency, and ties the bandage off without excess.
"There," he says, and sits back on his heels.
He doesn't stand up. He stays there, at eye level, and the fire is behind him now, and the light does something to his face that makes him look less like the man who stood in Council Hall two days ago and more like someone who has been carrying something heavy for a very long time and is getting tired.
"Ryder," I say.
"Don't." His voice is quiet. "Don't ask if I'm all right. I'm not. But I will be."
"I wasn't going to ask if you're all right." I study his face. "I was going to ask what you're not saying."
He's quiet for several seconds. The fire pops. Outside, I can hear Thane's footsteps, slow and irregular, a man walking in circles he doesn't know he's making.
"I had a sister," Ryder says.
The sentence lands like a stone dropped in still water.
"Her name was Mira." He's still crouched in front of me, forearms resting on his knees, and his gaze has dropped to the floor between us.
"She was seventeen. She had my mother's coloring and absolutely none of my patience, which was probably an improvement over the original model.
" A pause. "She was training at an outpost when the wraiths came through.
They lost three students that day. Mira was one of them. "
I don't say anything. He's not done.
"I was supposed to be there," he says. "I was assigned to that outpost rotation. I traded the shift because I had evidence work I thought was more important." His jaw tightens. "It wasn't more important."
"You couldn't have known—"
"No." His voice doesn't rise. It goes flatter, which is worse. "I've heard that. It doesn't change the calculation. If I'd been there, she might have survived. I wasn't there. She didn't." He finally looks up. "Every wraith that comes through a breach since then is a debt I'm paying."
"And me?" I ask. "Is that what I am? Another debt?"
Something moves across his face that I don't have a name for. Raw and unguarded and not at all like the man who walked into my first class and dismantled every illusion I had about this place being survivable.
"No," he says. "You're what I'm terrified of losing."
The fire settles. Outside, Thane's footsteps stop.
"That's the most honest thing you've ever said to me," I tell him.
"Don't make a thing of it."
"I'm not making a thing of it." I lean forward slightly. "I'm noting it. There's a difference."
He looks at me for a long moment, and the bond is open between us in a way I've been trying to describe to myself since the first time I felt it and have never quite managed.
It's not warmth exactly, though it runs warm.
It's more like the feeling of a room when someone else is already in it.
Not alone. That specific absence of alone.
"When that wraith hit you," he says, "and you went down—"
"I got back up."
"I know you did." He exhales slowly. "That's not the part that stays with me."
I reach out and put my uninjured hand on his jaw. His whole body stills, the way it does when I touch him without warning, that particular arrest of a man who has been braced for the world and can't quite process gentleness when it arrives.
"I got back up," I say again, quieter. "I'm still here."
He turns his face slightly into my palm. Just slightly. Just enough.
"Angelic," he says.
"Don't explain it," I tell him. "Don't tell me what you can and can't give, or what the bond means or doesn't mean, or why this is complicated. I know it's complicated. I was there for all of it."
He rises from his crouch and sits beside me on the bench instead, close enough that his knee is against mine, and for a moment we just exist in the same space with the fire going and the night outside and the weight of the last several hours settling between us like sediment.
"I broke things," he says. "With you. Deliberately."
"Yes."
"I knew what I was doing and I did it anyway."
"I know." I keep my hand against his jaw. He hasn't moved away from it. "You were protecting yourself. I understand that now. It doesn't mean it didn't leave marks."
"No." His voice is rough. "It doesn't."
"But I'm not asking you to fix the past," I say. "I'm asking what happens now."
He lifts his hand and covers mine, the one still resting against his face.
His fingers are warm and the grip is careful, the same careful he used on my arm, and he turns my palm up and presses his mouth to the inside of my wrist, just above the bandage, where my pulse is doing something unsteady that he can absolutely feel against his lips.
"Tell me what you want," he says, against my skin.
"You know what I want."
"I want to hear you say it."
I tilt his face up with the hand he's holding, and the bond runs through me like current, open and bright and not frightening the way it was in the beginning.
"You," I say. "Tonight. This."
He kisses me, and it's nothing like the first time, which was shock and desperation and neither of us admitting what we were doing.
This is deliberate. His hand comes up to my face, his thumb along my cheekbone, and the kiss is slow and thorough and entirely unhurried, as though he has decided that if this is happening, he's going to do it correctly.
I turn toward him and his other arm comes around my waist, pulling me closer, and I go willingly, which is its own kind of answer to a question neither of us asked out loud.
"Are you sure?" he asks, against my mouth.
"Yes."
"Your arm—"
"Is fine. Stop talking about my arm."
He makes a sound that might be a laugh, low and quiet, and kisses me again, deeper this time. His hands are everywhere careful, no urgency, no rush, and I realize that's deliberate too. He's not taking anything. He's offering.
I pull back long enough to look at him, at the fire-lit lines of his face and the dark of his eyes and the man who told me about his sister twenty minutes ago like pulling a splinter out of old wood, painful and necessary and too long left.
"Ryder," I say.
"Still here," he says.
I reach for the buttons of his jacket. His hands cover mine immediately.
"Are you sure?" he asks again.
"You're going to keep asking me that, aren't you."
"Every time," he says. "Until you tell me to stop."
"Then yes," I say. "I'm sure. Now let me do this."
He drops his hands and lets me work the buttons, watching my face while I do it with an attention that would be unnerving if the bond weren't running so open and warm between us that I can feel his steadiness like a second heartbeat.
I push the jacket off his shoulders, and he shrugs out of it, and then his hands are at the hem of my shirt, a question in the pause before he moves further.
"Yes," I say, before he asks.