Chapter Fifteen - Evie #2
“I know.” And still He held the cup there.
My throat burned dry with thirst. It had for hours, maybe longer. I could no longer tell whether I was refusing on principle or simply because my body was too frightened of what would happen after I swallowed. But I took the cup.
Even that small motion cost me. My fingers trembled hard enough to send ripples shivering across the surface. Then, I just stared into it, convinced I would see something there, some sign of corruption, some proof of whatever trap I was too weak to avoid. But… I only saw my own warped reflection.
I raised it to my mouth. The first sip was tiny.
I waited for pain, for fire. For something.
For my stomach to twist and seize, sending me diving for the basin again.
Instead, the water touched my tongue, cool and clean.
It tasted almost unbearably simple. There was no sweetness or gilded strangeness. It was just plain water.
I swallowed again, and my stomach clenched. I closed my eyes and waited for the familiar lurch, but it didn’t come. There was nothing, and my breath caught.
“Again,” He said.
I opened my eyes and glared at Him over the rim, but the force of it was ruined by the fact that I obeyed. Another sip. Then another. Every sip felt like a wager. Every swallow felt like surrender. But the water stayed down.
The burning in my throat eased by slow degrees. The pressure in my skull loosened. The trembling in my hands softened just enough that I no longer feared dropping the cup. My stomach still felt tender and uncertain, but no longer like a fist had closed around it.
A sound escaped me then, small and fractured and humiliatingly close to relief. His hand remained at my back, steady and warm.
“There,” He murmured.
I couldn’t look at Him, but I drank the rest because my body wanted it more than my pride did.
When the cup was empty, He took it from me and set it aside.
He didn’t move away right away. I could still feel the warmth of His hand through the fabric of my robe, could still feel the awful steadiness of Him behind me.
“What did You do to it?” I asked.
“Enough.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“No,” He said, and this time there was the faintest ghost of that unbearable softness in His voice. “But it is the one you’re getting.”
I should have said something sharp. I should have found some blade still left in me. But the room had finally stopped tilting, and for the first time in days, I wasn’t bracing for the next wave of nausea like it was already on its way. The absence of it felt so sudden, so strange, it almost hurt.
My eyes filled before I could stop them, and I quickly turned my face away. He didn’t comment on it, and that somehow made it worse.
After a moment, He reached for the bread on the tray. Panic flashed through me instantly.
“No.”
His gaze came back to mine at once.
“Not yet,” I said, and hated the plea in my own voice. “Please.”
Something in His expression changed then. Something small and devastating, like understanding.
He set the bread back down. “As you wish.”
I stared at Him as He rose, taking some of the warmth with Him, though not all of it. Some trace remained in the water resting cool in my stomach and in the horrible fact that I no longer felt on the verge of vomiting.
At the end of the bed, He paused. “Try the bread later,” He said. “Slowly.”
A weak, bitter laugh slipped out of me. “Now You’re giving me instructions?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
He looked at me with that quiet, impossible attention that always felt like more than looking, like He could tunnel directly into my soul.
“Because your suffering is not pleasing to Me,” He said.
I didn’t know what to do with that. I didn’t know where to put it. Beside that weird hidden chamber of His? Beside Luc and everything He’d already tried to steal from me?
And yet. He had come. He had seen me half-broken in this bed, too weak to stand, too sick to hate Him properly, and He had not made a spectacle of it. He hadn’t used it against me or demanded anything in exchange.
He had just handed me water. And I had let Him.
That was the part that sank its teeth into me. Not just that He had helped, but that I had taken it. I let Him touch me. I let my body lean into the relief before my pride could stop it. I let myself drink what He offered like I’d forgotten whose hands it came from.
Revulsion moved through me, hot and ugly. I hated Him. But for one vicious second, I hated myself more.
When He left, the room felt different, shaped by His absence. I stayed in bed staring at the tray. The broth still steamed faintly in its bowl. The bread sat untouched beside it.
Sure, the room had stopped pitching, and the acid taste in the back of my throat was fading.
Even the ache behind my eyes had dulled to something distant and manageable.
But I didn’t trust any of it. Because for the first time since this began, the thing that frightened me most was not my sickness.
It was the fact that His kindness had felt real.
My stomach rolled once and then seemed to settle. Slowly, I pressed a hand there without thinking, and then I lay back slowly, one hand braced over my middle, waiting for the nausea to gather itself and come roaring back.
It didn’t.
At some point, still half-curled around my suspicion, I fell asleep.
When I woke again, it was with a sharp, startled breath and the strange disorienting certainty that something was wrong.
That the sickness had come back in some new form.
Then my stomach growled, and I went still.
Because this wasn’t that twisting, rolling sick sensation that had haunted me for days. It was hunger.
It was real hunger. I pushed myself up on my elbows and waited, half-expecting the movement alone to bring the room tilting back sideways. But it stayed steady. My body felt weak and hollowed out and tired, but it no longer felt like it was waging war against itself.
Slowly, like I was approaching a trap, I turned toward the tray.
The water cup sat empty where He’d set it down.
Beside it was the bread. It looked plain enough.
Pale gold crust, soft in the middle, torn where He’d offered it from before.
Nothing about it seemed suspicious. It was just bread, so I reached for it.
My hand hesitated above it for half a breath before I pulled off a small piece and brought it to my mouth.
The moment it touched my tongue, I froze.
It was sweet and a little like Hawaiian rolls, but deeper than that, warm and clean and rich in a way I had no name for, like every version of comfort food I’d ever known had been ground together and baked into a single bite.
Like something your mother used to make.
It was like sunlight and safety all wrapped together.
But it didn’t taste like any of those things exactly, and somehow it tasted like all of them.