Chapter 14 An Uncomfortable Amount of Awareness
An Uncomfortable Amount of Awareness
Cassie
Inside, the suite felt smaller than it had that morning.
No Ronan at the door. No Ian at the window. No Lucien with that polished calm. Just Sava, the nurse, the locked windows, and the faint pull beneath my bandage stretching toward the door.
I hated how much emptier the room felt without him.
That was not romance.
It was the mark.
It had to be.
Sava helped me into bed and checked the bite. The black lines were faint now, clustered close around the bandage. She seemed pleased. I distrusted pleased doctors on principle.
“How long will he be gone?” I asked.
Sava didn’t look up. “You mean Ian.”
“No, I mean the other terrifying man my shoulder keeps tabs on.”
“At least an hour if Brenner can speak.”
The mark tightened again and I breathed through it.
Sava paused. “Pain?”
“Not exactly.”
“Explain.”
I stared at the ceiling. “It’s like my body knows he’s gone and keeps waiting for the room to correct itself.”
Sava’s hands stilled.
I turned my head toward her. “Do not look excited.”
“I am not excited.”
“You look like someone gave you a puzzle with organs.”
“I am concerned.”
“That’s worse.”
She covered the bandage again. “The connection is expanding beyond pain response. That does not mean it is permanent.”
“Does saying that make patients less likely to panic?”
“Sometimes.”
“Has it ever worked?”
“No.”
At least she was honest.
The nurse brought water. I drank because Sava watched me until refusal became more exhausting than compliance.
Minutes passed. Too many. The pull became a low ache behind the bite, then spread beneath my ribs.
I tried to read the messages on my phone after Sava gave it back under supervision, but Dad’s texts blurred.
Tessa had sent seven apologies and one picture of Henry asleep on her lap, looking smug enough to survive a monarchy.
Aunt Linda had sent a single message that said, “Still not arrested.”
I should have smiled.
Instead, I kept checking the locked door.
Sava noticed.
Again.
“Cassie.”
“I know.”
“What do you know?”
“That I’m looking for him.”
She sat in the chair beside the bed. “And how does that make you feel?”
I turned my head slowly.
“If you therapize me while I’m poisoned, I will become difficult.”
“You are already difficult. Answer anyway.”
I looked back at the ceiling.
How did it make me feel? Angry, obviously. Violated. Afraid. Humiliated by my own body. All the reliable words were still there, but they no longer filled the whole room.
Under them was something quieter. The memory of Ian stopping when I said his name.
The way he had looked at Grant’s letter like it was filth and still let me decide what happened to it.
His hand under mine. His back turned while I dressed.
His voice telling me I didn’t have to answer when Ronan asked what he things felt like.
The way the mark had gone calm when I touched his wrist, and he had listened.
“I don’t know,” I said finally.
It was the most honest answer I had.
Sava accepted it. “Good.”
I looked at her. “That was not good.”
“It is better than naming something too early.”
That shut me up, for about thirty seconds anyway. Then a sharp pulse tore through the mark and I gasped and grabbed the sheet.
Sava stood immediately. “Pain?”
“No.”
It was fear, and it wasn’t mine.
Ian.
The fear hit again, hard and controlled, buried under violence so quickly that if the bond had not caught the first flash, I would have missed it. Something had happened. Something bad enough to frighten a man who looked like fear usually belonged to other people.
I tried to sit up.
Sava pushed me back with one hand. “No.”
“Something happened.”
“Describe it.”
“Ian.”
She went still. “What about him?”
“He’s afraid.”
Sava’s expression changed but the door opened before she could speak.
Ian came in first and he was covered in blood.
For one second, the room dropped away. Then I saw the way he held his hands out from his sides, palms open, body rigid with restraint.
Not his blood.
Ronan entered behind him, face like stone. Lucien followed, pale beneath his usual calm.
Ian stopped inside the door and didn’t come closer, but the mark reached for him so violently my whole body arched.
Sava caught my shoulder. “Cassie.”
“I’m fine.”
I was not fine. I was staring at the blood on Ian’s shirt, on his forearms, in a streak along his jaw. His eyes were dark. Human. Too controlled.
That frightened me more than gold would have.
“What happened?” I asked.
Ronan answered. “Brenner woke.”
Ian’s gaze stayed on me. I could feel him holding himself back. The blood had changed him. Not into the wolf, exactly. Into the man who had learned to stand still while violence tried to finish moving through him.
“He said a name,” Ronan said.
The room seemed to draw tight around the words. Ronan looked at me, then at Ian.
“Evelyn,” he said.
The mark pulsed once, hard and cold, but Ian still didn’t move toward me.
That was when I realized the blood on him had started drying.
He had stayed away long enough to come back under control.
He had come to the door instead of the bed because he knew how he looked.
Because he knew I would be afraid. Because even with blood on his skin and a wolf under it, he was still choosing what reached me.
My throat tightened.
“Ian,” I said.
His eyes closed for one second and the mark warmed with relief. His relief…and maybe a little of mine.
When he opened his eyes, I saw the effort it took him not to cross the room.
“Are you hurt?” I asked.
“No.”
“Is Brenner alive?”
“Yes.”
“Did you kill anyone?”
Ronan answered. “No.”
I looked back at Ian. He was still watching me like the answer should matter more from him.
“No,” he said.
I breathed out. Sava looked between us, quiet and sharp. Ronan saw it too. He stood near the door, Alpha and jailer and brother, and understood at the same time I did that something had shifted while Ian was gone.
Ian had left bloody and afraid, and some part of me had felt it from across the resort. Now he stood ten feet away, refusing to bring that blood to my bedside unless I allowed it. My body wanted him closer.
My mind on the other hand, was not ready to want anything.
So I gave us both the only middle ground I could manage.
“There’s a bathroom through that door,” I said. “Wash your hands before you come near me.”
Ian’s face changed, grateful in a way that made my chest hurt. He nodded once and went. The bathroom door closed and water started running.
Ronan looked at me.
I met his stare, exhausted and shaking under the blankets.
“What?”
His voice was quiet. “You can feel him at distance.”
“You already knew that.”
“What else can you feel?”
I looked toward the bathroom door. The water ran steadily. Ian’s blood would be circling the drain. His hands would be braced on the sink. His head might be bowed. I knew that last part without seeing it.
Or maybe I only imagined it.
That was the terrifying thing now.
The line between knowing and wanting to know had begun to blur.
I looked back at Ronan. “I can feel enough to know you’re both worried.”
His expression didn’t change. Ronan, for the first time since I had met him, gave me no immediate answer.
Good. Let him feel what it was like to be the one being read.
The water shut off and Ian came back with clean hands, clean jaw, and a fresh black shirt pulled from some secret werewolf bathroom stash.
He stopped by the bathroom door and waited. I held his gaze, then I nodded pointedly toward the chair beside the bed.
“Sit down,” I said.
He did. Not close enough to touch but close enough for my body to stop searching the room for him.
Ronan watched us both and said nothing.
Outside the locked windows, dusk darkened the glass.
We were one day closer to the full moon.