Once Betrayed, Twice Shy

My weaknesses

CASPIAN

She wakes an hour later.

Not gradually — she surfaces quickly, the way she does everything, and her eyes are open and focused before she’s fully oriented. She looks at the window. At the proper daylight. At the room.

At me.

At our hands.

A beat.

“I fell asleep,” she says.

“Yes,” I say.

“In your chair.”

“Yes.”

She looks at the chair. At the book tilted in her lap. At the morning that has advanced significantly while she was unconscious. “How long?”

“About an hour.”

She exhales. Sits up straighter. Her hand moves in mine — not pulling away, just shifting, adjusting. I loosen my grip slightly to give her room. She doesn’t pull away.

“You should have woken me,” she says.

“You needed the sleep.”

“I need—” she stops. Looks at me. The morning composure is still slightly down, the sleep-softness not fully resolved into the daytime version of herself. “You stayed.”

“Yes,” I say.

“The whole time.”

“Yes.”

She looks at that for a moment. At the fact of it. I watch her process it the way she processes things — directly, without looking away, running it through whatever internal accounting system she uses for things I do that don’t fit the version of me she’s been building.

“Okay,” she says finally.

“Okay,” I say.

She looks at our hands. Then she does something I don’t expect — she turns mine over. Her thumb moving across the back of it, across the old scar that runs along the knuckles, slow and deliberate. Examining it. Like the bird with the broken wing.

I go very still.

“Where did this one come from,” she says.

She’s asked this before, about other scars. The one on my jaw. The one on my forearm. She asks without the morbid curiosity that some people bring to it — just honest interest, the way she’s honestly interested in everything she doesn’t know yet.

“A warlord in the eastern territories,” I say. “Four hundred years ago, approximately. He had very good aim.”

“Did he survive?”

“No.”

She traces the length of the scar. Her touch is careful in the specific way she’s careful with things she’s decided matter — the bird, the dresses, old books.

“Does it hurt?” she asks.

“No.”

“Did it?”

“Yes,” I say. “For about two days.”

She looks up at me. “Two days for a wound this size.”

“Lycan healing,” I say. “The silver-laced ones take longer.”

“How much longer?”

I think about the bullets from the attack. “Weeks, sometimes. Depending on the concentration.”

She’s quiet for a moment, still looking at the scar. “How many times have you been hurt like that? With silver.”

“Over several centuries?”

“Yes.”

I think about it. “I’ve stopped counting.”

She looks at me with an expression I can’t immediately name — not pity, something else. Something that has more weight than pity and less sentimentality. Like she’s looking at the full cost of something and not looking away from it.

“That’s,” she says, and then stops.

“Yes,” I say.

She looks back at the scar. Her thumb makes one more slow pass across it and then she turns my hand back over and doesn’t let go.

We sit in the morning light and I think about four hundred years of scars and the specific novelty of someone counting them who isn’t doing it to catalogue my weaknesses.