Chapter 34
She woke to the room she did not know, to a body she did not trust, to the shape of him asleep beside her.
For a heartbeat she lay very still, listening.
The inn creaked in the ribs. Someone coughed down the corridor.
A cart rattled outside, iron wheel hitting a loose stone.
Death lay on his side, one arm slack between them, his hair pushed off his brow yet absurdly tidied in sleep.
The fire tampered down to a red seam and the scent of last night still clung to the air, warm and human and undeniable.
Her stomach turned.
No. The word came without sound. It rose like sickness.
She slid out from the sheet and stood. The room blurred. She found her dress by touch and dragged it over herself, fingers clumsy at the laces. Her shoulder throbbed where the bandage tugged. She did not put her boots on right away; she did not want the sound. She wanted the door. She wanted air.
The stair complained under her weight, startling the low hush of embers and swept sawdust. The innkeeper’s wife glanced up from a bucket, eyes quick, then down again, mercy in the look of a woman who had seen too much to ask.
Outside, the morning shone a paper gray.
Mist hung from the eaves. The street had not yet woken to its own noise.
She sat on the inn steps to pull on her boots and had to stop halfway, bracing her forearm against her knee, fighting the urge to retch.
What have you done?
She forced the laces tight, stood too fast, steadied on the doorframe, then walked. Anywhere. Away from the inn with its clean, lemoned sheets and the imprint of his body on a mattress that now knew her shape.
A boy swept a doorway with more zeal than success.
A woman tipped wash water into the gutter and nodded once at Ilys without curiosity.
Smoke bled from a handful of chimneys, urging the day ahead.
. Her feet took her toward the small square.
A shrine leaned there, half-collapsed, its stone saint weathered to a softened face.
Someone had tucked a sprig of rosemary into a crack.
She stood in front of it and tried to have a thought that was not a feeling.
I cannot do this.
Last night unspooled in hard flashes. She shut it out with both hands as if the mind were a door.
The nausea rose again, bright and daft. She swallowed it.
She crossed the square to the pump and worked the handle until water came in a clean rush.
She cupped her palms and threw it into her face.
The shock refused to steady. She drank from her hands anyway, chin dripping, breath juddering like a lame wheel.
He is dying. The thought came uninvited and sat down with its arms folded. He is dying and you just taught yourself the shape of his mouth.
A dog trotted past with a crust in its teeth.
Somewhere a smith struck iron. She walked again, out of the square and along a lane where back gardens surrendered winter cabbages and tired rosemary to the fog.
Her shoulder began to ache in earnest. The gash pulsed in time with her steps.
Good, she thought, small and vicious. Feel that. Remember what you are for.
You are for the Veil. You are for the blade. You are not for this.
A memory she had not asked for rose clean: his hands grasping and his mouth pulling, lavishing—
She stopped with her palm flat to a garden wall, breath loud in her head. The sickness curdled into grief, and she refused that, too.
If Grim could see you. If Baron—
She shut her teeth on his name. The taste of it hurt.
A cart approached behind her. “You’ll want to step off the lane,” the driver said without malice.
She obeyed, found the ditch edge, waited for it to pass.
The man lifted two fingers in thanks. She watched the wheel go by and thought, wildly, of time.
How it moved whether she wanted it or not. How last night already belonged to it.
Her hands shook and she tucked them into her sleeves and kept walking until the town thinned.
Past the last thatch, the road shouldered up into low fields and a hedgerow tatty with last year’s nests.
Fog clung to the grass in scraps. She stood there, on the edge of leaving, and tried to measure it: how far she could go before he woke.
How far she would have to go before she did not turn back.
The answer was not far at all.
“That bad?” His voice low, even, and too certain slipped through the mist.
Her gut twisted. She turned, and of course he was there, his dark eyes fixed on her.
They weren’t hard or cold as she might have preferred, but thoughtful, warm, almost amused—as though her storm were just another weather he had expected all along.
She hated the way her pulse jumped under his regard, how her body leaned toward him even as her mind snarled to pull away.
Ilys groaned, head tipping back.
He spared her the trouble of answering, only nodded toward the inn. “Breakfast?”
She huffed, brushed past him, and walked ahead, willing herself not to feel the gravity of his presence at her back.
The inn smelled of smoke and onions, of wool steaming near the hearth.
The benches were already crowded with traders and farmers, but the innkeeper’s wife found them space at a corner table.
She set down two bowls with a dull thud: watery broth, cabbage gone limp, and a wedge of bread that fell apart the moment Ilys touched it.
Her appetite died on sight.
Death looked from her plate to her face, one brow lifting. “Do you have anything else?” he asked the innkeeper’s wife. His tone polite but firm
The woman frowned. “This is breakfast.”
“She does not care for—”
“Do not finish that sentence.” Ilys’s voice cut sharper than she meant, but the heat in her chest only swelled when he glanced back at her, unruffled.
“You do not like that,” he said simply.
Her spoon clattered against the bowl. “And how would you know?”
His gaze held hers, exasperating in its dogged nature. “Because you told me.”
“That was a conversation,” she snapped, voice rising despite the nearby ears. “Not an invitation to memorize my every whim like a nursemaid.”
The bench scraped as she leaned forward, glaring. Her stomach knotted, not from the broth, but from the quiet certainty in his eyes.
“I did it without thinking,” he said at last. His tone lost its edge, almost conciliatory. “I’m sorry. Dine away.” He made a small, dismissive wave toward her bowl, as though that settled it.
They ate in brittle silence, each scrape of her spoon against the bowl loud as a strike. Her anger festered with every bite, swelling like a wound she could not bind.
“How is your shoulder?” he asked finally, pleasantly, as though the night before had given him the right.
Her spoon clattered against the table, resolve snapping. “We are not lovers!” she shouted, too loud, too raw
Conversations faltered. A few heads turned.
Ilys’s chest heaved, every breath ragged with the effort of holding herself together.
Death didn’t rise to meet her fury. He didn’t argue. He didn’t even blink. Instead, he reached across the table with that same calm precision that infuriated her and pulled both their bowls toward him, stacking them placidly. Then he stood, lifting the dishes in one hand.
“Let’s take this to our room,” he said evenly, but his eyes were molten with meaning.
Her heart stuttered. “Our—”
“Now,” he cut in, low, leaving no room for her protest.
The nearby patrons quickly returned to their own meals pretending all events regular and normal. Ilys pushed back from the bench, her legs shaky, heat coiling beneath her skin. She followed him, furious with herself for obeying, furious with the rush of want tangled with dread in her blood.
They climbed the stairs and the din of the common room faded behind them. The boards creaked under their weight. Death’s hand curled tighter around the bowls as he led her down the narrow corridor. He didn’t look back, but she could feel his awareness on her as surely as if he had.
She followed, breathing hard, every step an argument she hadn’t yet spoken. Her pulse thrummed in her throat like a bird trying to beat its way out of a snare.
He reached her door, nudged it open with his shoulder, and stepped inside, setting the bowls on the little table by the window.
Ilys lingered in the doorway, fists curled at her sides, her breath uneven. She hated that he could still look at her like that, with a mere stare, communicating that she was wholly known.
“Well?” she demanded, voice hoarse.
He closed the door with one lazy push. The latch caught.
“I think it’s best you start, Ilys. What was that?”
The words broke out of her raw and bright, as much to herself as to him. She felt like she was building her own case, sentencing herself in real time.
“I cannot do this,” she said, her voice cracking. “I only want to be with you because I dislike myself so much I cannot imagine any relationship more fitting.” She wanted to wound, so she did. Her eyes found his and she spat the final blade.
“I hate you.”
“I do not think that is true,” he said, calm as a tide.
“I tried to kill you. You hate me.” She took two steps and struck her fists against his chest, sharp and human. “We are enemies.”
He caught her wrists, firm but not cruel, fingers closing until her bones remembered they were bones. “No,” he said, a denial that did not blink. “I love you.”
She stared at him, stunned into anger. “How can you say that?” She gestured at the two of them. “This is fucked.”
“This,” he gritted, pulling her closer even as he held her wrists wide, “is the only thing I have glimpsed that is the farthest thing from that. You are scared, and I understand. I am a blip in your long life.” His breath shook once, then steadied.
“I do not have the privilege of being afraid of this. I am dying.”
Her chin tipped up, defiant. “And you think I’m afraid?”