Once Betrayed, Twice Shy

Doesn’t work

CASPIAN

She doesn’t sleep.

I know because I don’t either, and the bond is a precise instrument — it tells me things about her that she hasn’t chosen to share, the way it tells me where she is in the palace at any given hour, the general quality of her state. Tonight it tells me she’s awake. Has been awake since well past midnight, in the window seat of her room most likely, with the particular restless quality that means she’s thinking about something she hasn’t decided what to do with yet.

I leave her to it.

I work until three. Review the border intelligence. Sign off on the supply requisitions Soren has been waiting on for a week. Read the same paragraph of the Monroe report four times before I accept that I’m not actually reading it and close the file.

I go to bed.

I don’t sleep.

The bond hums at the back of my skull — not distress, just presence, the constant low frequency of her that I have stopped being able to tune out and have largely stopped trying to. She’s still awake. Still in the window seat, I think. Still turning something over in that particular way she has, the way I’ve learned to recognise from the quality of the silence she produces when her mind is working on something she hasn’t decided to say yet.

I think about the library.

The moment by the window seat when I reached past her for the book and the bond tightened and we both went still and Marcus walked in with the timing of a man specifically deployed by the universe to prevent things from developing naturally.

I think about her face after he left. The thing that moved through it when she was looking at us — me and Marcus, the shape of us together in a room — and the way she looked away too quickly, and what she said when I asked.

Nothing.

Said exactly the way people say nothing when it’s something they haven’t decided to hand over yet.

I lie in the dark and think about the look on her face and the bond tells me she’s still awake and I close my eyes and think about something else. The border reports. The Monroe timeline. The supply chain issue on the eastern route that Soren keeps flagging.

It doesn’t work.

***

At dawn I give up and go to the kitchen.

It’s early enough that the cook hasn’t arrived yet, the kitchen empty and cold, the fire needing to be built back up from the overnight embers. I do it myself — it’s something I’ve done since long before I had people to do it for me, and there are mornings when the muscle memory of it is useful.

She walks in twenty minutes later.

She stops when she sees me.

I look up from the fire.

She’s in the soft clothes she sleeps in — the ones that appeared in her wardrobe a month ago, that she wore without comment and without thanks, which I filed away as a small specific victory at the time and haven’t thought about since. Her hair is loose. She has the slightly unfocused look of someone who has been awake too long.

She looks at me crouched by the fire and then at the kitchen around me and then back at me.

“You cook,” she says.

“I light fires,” I say. “It’s a different skill set.”

She comes further into the room. Opens the cabinet above the counter with the ease of someone who knows where things are — she’s been in this kitchen enough now that she does — and takes down the tea things without asking if I want any. She puts the kettle on. Then she leans against the counter and looks at me with the particular expression she gets in the early morning when her guard is down before she’s fully decided to put it back up.

I’ve noticed this about her. She’s different in the early morning. Less constructed. Closer to whatever she actually is underneath the composure she maintains the rest of the day.

“You didn’t sleep,” she says.

“I slept,” I say.

She looks at me.

“Some,” I say.

She accepts this without pressing it, which is a small mercy. She watches the kettle. I finish with the fire and stand and lean against the opposite counter and we exist in the kitchen in the early morning quiet in the way we’ve been existing in spaces together lately — not hostile, not easy exactly, something in between that doesn’t have a clean name.

The kettle boils.

She makes two cups without asking. Sets one on the counter near me and wraps both hands around the other.

I look at the cup.

I look at her.

She’s looking at the window, at the grey pre-dawn light coming through it, with the expression she had in the library last night before she said nothing. Still carrying whatever it is. Still not having decided what to do with it.

“What were you thinking about,” I say. “Last night.”

She looks at me. “When?”

“In the library. When Marcus left.”

She’s quiet for a moment. Looking at her tea. “What makes you think I was thinking about anything specific?”

“You went quiet in a particular way,” I say. “You do it when something has landed that you haven’t processed yet.”

She looks up at me with an expression that is several things at once — surprised, slightly disarmed, something else underneath both of those that she moves to cover quickly. “You’ve catalogued my silences,” she says.

“You’ve catalogued mine,” I say.

She opens her mouth. Closes it. Because she has. I’ve watched her do it — the careful attention she pays to the register of my quiet, the way she’s learned to read what’s in it. We’ve been doing this to each other for months and apparently neither of us has said it out loud until now.

The kitchen is very quiet.

“I was thinking,” she says finally, “about how easy it would be to belong here.”

She says it to her tea rather than to me. Matter-of-fact. Like she’s reporting something she’d rather not but has decided honesty is less costly than the alternative.

I don’t say anything.