Wren POV
The water is cold.
That is the first thing I notice when I wake up. Cold water in the glass beside my cot, which means it was placed recently within the last hour because medical rooms stay warm and water left overnight goes room temperature. Someone was here while I slept.
I know who.
I drink the whole glass without sitting up properly and stare at the empty chair and tell myself very firmly that I am not going to read anything into any of this. He stayed because Dr. Hess told him to. He left a note about food because I am an investment and investments require maintenance. The water is cold because someone on night staff was instructed to check on me and followed instructions. That is all. Everything has a practical explanation and I am going to hold onto every single one of those explanations and not look at what is underneath them.
I fail at that almost immediately.
The plate beside the water has eggs and toast and something warm underneath the cover that turns out to be a small bowl of the soup Gerda makes on cold mornings the one she only makes for ranked pack members. I know because I have served it and never eaten it. I eat all of it slowly and I try not to feel things about the soup and I feel things about the soup anyway.
Dr. Hess comes in at nine and tells me to stay through the morning. I do not argue. Partly because I genuinely do not have the energy and partly because the medical room has a window that faces the east garden and the light coming through it is the nicest light I have had in my room since I arrived. I lie on the cot and watch it move across the wall.
I let myself think about Lyra.
Properly, this time. Not the emergency version I have been doing the one where I think her name, feel the drop in my stomach, and immediately redirect to something practical before the grief gets its hands all the way around me. The real version. The one I have been running from since the night of the raid because I have been so focused on surviving what came after that I never stopped to actually mourn what I lost.
Lyra Ashfall. Twenty years old. Gold hair and easy smile and a laugh that carried across rooms. We grew up in the same pack, under the same roof for three years when we were younger, and we were never close in the way sisters in stories are close. She was not cruel to me. She was not anything to me, mostly she existed in a different layer of the world, the sunlit layer where people got invited to things and called by their names and given soup on cold mornings.
But she was mine in the way that anyone you grow up alongside becomes quietly yours. The background of your whole life. The person you knew so well from a distance that you could predict her laugh before she made it.
She did not deserve to die.
And I could not save her.
Those two things sit in my chest at the same time and I let them sit there without trying to resolve them and the grief is large and real and I breathe through it until it settles into something I can carry.
The afternoon is quiet. Pip brings me lunch without being asked and this time this one time he looks at me directly when he sets it down. Half a second. Then his eyes go back to the floor and he leaves. But he looked. I count it.
Evening comes. Dr. Hess does a final check, tells me I can return to my room tonight or stay another night, my choice. I tell her I will go back to my room. She nods and leaves and I lie in the dimming light and feel sleep pulling at the edges of things.
I am almost under when I feel it.
The air in the room changes. That specific shift a weight, a warmth, a presence that my body has been cataloguing for ten days without my permission. My eyes open.
He is in the doorway.
Not in the room. Just the doorway. One hand on the frame, like he stopped himself from coming fully in and is not sure yet if he made the right call. He is looking at me and the light is low and his expression is the one I cannot read the one with too many things moving through it too fast.
We look at each other across the quiet room.
I should not say anything. I know that. I have been very careful and very controlled for ten days and saying nothing is the smart thing, the safe thing, the only thing that makes sense.
But I am exhausted. I am genuinely, deeply exhausted in the way that strips the careful layer off everything and leaves just the true version underneath. And the true version of me has been carrying one sentence for ten days with nowhere to put it.
It comes out before I decide to let it.
"I didn't let her die." My voice is soft. Almost nothing. "I ran toward her. I tried to reach her. The fire cut me off and I couldn't get through and I tried."
The words fall into the quiet room and dissolve.
Caius does not move. He is absolutely still in the doorway the way things go still when they are paying attention with everything they have. No expression I can name. No response.
The silence stretches.
Then he leaves.
No words. No reaction I can see. Just gone, footsteps fading down the hall, and I am alone in the medical room staring at the ceiling wondering if I just handed him something to use against me or said something that meant nothing at all or made everything infinitely worse.
I close my eyes.
I do not sleep for a long time.
When I finally do and then wake again in the deep quiet of the night needing water, I reach for the glass without looking and then sit up and look anyway because something feels different.
The chair.
It is closer than it was. Not much. Two inches, maybe three. Moved sometime between when he left and now, sitting at the exact distance that would put him if he were sitting in it near enough that the warmth would reach me properly.
He moved the chair and then he left.
I do not think he meant to do that. I think he moved it without noticing and left before he could notice he had done it. And in this small, impossible, completely inconvenient inch of space between where the chair was and where it is now, there is more information than anything he has said to me since the auction.
I set down the water glass.
Outside my window in the night garden, something moves. A shadow large, four-legged crossing the east garden at the edge of the trees. Moving in a slow circuit. Not hunting. Not running.
Keeping watch.
I press my hand flat against the window glass and watch him circle until he disappears into the dark, and I am terrified by how much I do not want him to stop.