Marked By Tide

Chapter 6 - The Vigil

Cassian's POV

I wake up in the chair.

I do not know what time it is. The lamp has burned lower. The room is gray at the edges with the kind of gray that means the sky outside has started to do something pre-dawn, and the wood ceiling is doing the morning thing wood ceilings do when the light starts to come up through the window — going from black to brown to almost-gold.

My neck hurts. My back hurts. My right hand has gone numb because I have been sleeping with it folded against my hip for hours.

My hand is still half-against her hip through the blanket.

I have not moved it.

My body did not let me move it, even unconscious. I went under at some point in the middle of the night — I do not remember when — and my body kept the hand exactly where it had been before I went under, six inches above her hip, almost-touching her through the wool, and the bond apparently kept watch through my sleep because the bond is humming softly when I come up out of the dark and the humming has the texture of a thing that has been *holding*. The bond is good at holding. The bond has been holding for me while I slept.

I check her first. That is the first thing. Before I check the room, before I check my brother, before I do anything else, I look at the girl on the bed.

She is breathing.

Her chest is rising and falling. The color in her face is — slightly better. Less gray. More almost-pink across the cheekbones, which is the part of her that has been catching me every time I look at her, the small almost-pink that is the closest thing I have yet seen to her body remembering it is allowed to keep blood in it. Her hair is across the pillow. Her right hand is tucked against her own chest. Her left hand is at her side near my hand.

She is alive.

The bond is humming.

She is alive and the bond is humming and I have not lost her in the four hours or however long it has been since I went under, and Surge — who has been quiet in the chapel through my sleep, holding the same watch I was supposed to be holding — exhales slowly inside my chest and says, in a voice almost ordinary: *good morning.*

*Good morning*, I tell him.

*She slept clean. Her pulse stayed in the high fifties most of the night. It dipped twice. Paloma woke up both times before either of us realized. She is good at her work.*

*I know.*

*Soren did not sleep.*

*I know.*

*He should have. You should have made him.*

*I did not have anything to make him with.*

I look across the room.

Soren is in the chair across the room. He has not moved. He is sitting in the same posture he was in when I last saw him, which is forward, elbows on his knees, hands folded between them, eyes on the bed. His eyes are open. They have been open all night. I do not know how long it has been since he has blinked, and I am not sure I want to know.

He looks at me when I look at him.

He looks tired in a way I am not going to be able to do anything about. The exhaustion is a layered thing — the bond, the run, the snap, the trees, the two hours of Paloma's work, the *being awake all night* part — and the layers have stacked into a single condition his face is now wearing, which is the condition of a man who is going to have to be told to lie down soon, by someone with the authority to tell him to, or he is not going to lie down at all.

"Hi," I say.

It comes out quieter than I meant it. The room is the kind of quiet you do not break with volume.

"Hi," Soren says.

A long beat.

"Did she — "

"Yes."

I sit up. The chair creaks. I move my hand back from the bed-edge slowly, because I do not want to wake her, and because moving my hand back is going to cost me something I do not yet have a name for, but I move it because I have to ask him something and I cannot ask him while half-touching her.

"Tell me."

He tells me. He tells me in the spare way he has of telling me things that have undone him, which is to use as few words as possible and let me fill the rest in from his face. He says:

"Three hours ago. Maybe two. I lost track."

"She woke up."

"Yes."

"All the way up?"

"No. Most of the way. She opened her eyes. She moved her head. She — looked at you first. Sleeping. You did not wake up. I did not wake you."

"Soren."

"Don't. You were dead on your feet. I let you sleep."

"Tell me the rest."

"Then she turned her head. She looked at me."

He stops. He has to. Whatever happened in the moment is still on him and he is not going to be able to push through it in one sentence, and I am not going to push him to. I sit and wait and let him put the words in the order he needs to put them in.

"She looked at me," he says. "For — I do not know. A long time. She did not have the strength to look long but she used what she had on me. Cassian."

"I know."

"She did not look afraid."

"Of you."

"Of *anything*. She was lying on a bed in a strange room she had never seen with two strangers in it, one of them in arm's reach of her body, and her face — her face did not do what every other part of her body has been telling us her face should have done." He looks at me. His eyes are wet. They were not wet a second ago. "Cassian. She is supposed to be afraid of us. She is supposed to be afraid of every man she has ever met. She is *not afraid of us*."

"It is the bond."

"I know it is the bond. I am telling you what it was like to be looked at by her not-afraid."

I do not have a response to that for a long beat. I sit with it. The bond hums softly. Surge, in the back of me, is quiet.

I say, eventually: "What did you do."

He says: "I did not move. I let her look. I — I crossed the room near the end. I crouched down by the bed where you could not see me from your chair. I wanted to be closer."

"Did you touch her."

"No. I almost did. I wanted to. I did not."

"Soren — "

"I told her two things."

"Out loud."

"Out loud. I do not know if she heard me. She was almost gone again. I told her my name. And I told her —" He stops. His jaw works. He continues. "I told her *we have her*. The way Paloma said it back when we brought her in. I wanted those to be the last two things she heard before she went back under. I did not want her to go back under into silence."

"Did she."

"Did she what."

"Hear you."

"I do not know. Her face moved a little. Her mouth tried for something. She went under before whatever it was got out of her."

The bond pulses softly between us. The twin bond and the new bond, both. I sit with what he has just told me. My brother spent the rest of the night four feet from a woman he could not touch, watching her sleep, holding the watch I should have been holding with him, and at some point in the middle of it he crossed the room and crouched beside her and said his name into her ear because he wanted to be the last sound she heard before the dark took her again.

I am going to remember this for the rest of my life.

"Soren."

"Yes."

"You need to lie down."

"I am not lying down."

"You are. Paloma has the second cot in the back room. You are going to lie down on it for an hour. I am awake now. I will sit with her. If she wakes up I will be three feet from her face the way you have been all night."

"Cassian — "

"Brother. Look at me. Look at me. You are going to be useful in two hours. Right now you are vibrating. Lie down."

He looks at me. He looks at her. He looks at me again. He pushes up off the chair like a man pushing up off something twice as heavy as he is, which is what he is doing, and he walks to the back-room door and he stops with his hand on the frame.

"You will get me the second she stirs."

"I will get you the second she stirs."

"Cassian."

"The second."

He goes through the door. The door does not close all the way behind him. He is in there but he is not out of earshot, which is the version of *lying down* that is actually available to him and I do not press for more.

---

I move to his chair.

I do not know why. I cannot say to myself what I am doing. I move my chair across the room into the position he was sitting in — close enough to the bed that I can see her face properly, far enough that I am not crowding her if she opens her eyes. I leave my old chair empty by her hip because if she wakes again and looks for the man who slept beside her, I want him to still be there in shape if not in body, and the empty chair is the closest thing I have.

I sit.

I look at her.

I sit for an hour. Maybe two. The light comes up through the window slowly the way the light comes up in this part of the territory — gold first, then pink, then the clean sea-gray of a real morning. The lamp burns down to almost nothing and I do not refill it because the morning light is coming up to take its job. Her chest rises and falls. The bond hums. Surge sits with me, quiet, the chapel quiet.

I think — not in any order, just as the thoughts arrive — about what we are going to do.

I think about who *we* are now. We are three. The bond is three. The pack lore for twin mates is sparse because twin Alpha heirs do not happen often and twin Alpha heirs with a fated mate happen less often, and the lore we do have is fragmentary and old, and Soren and I are going to have to write a lot of it ourselves with whatever this woman in the bed lets us write it as.

I think about her name. We do not know her name. She has not said it. We have not asked because she has not been awake long enough to ask. Her name is going to be the first word out of her mouth that is hers — not *hi* or *where am I*, both of which are normal — but her *name*, the thing she has been called all her life by people who have hurt her and people who have loved her, and we are going to hear it for the first time today probably, and the thought of it makes my throat do a small thing.

I think about the man who put the bruise on the side of her face.

I think about him for a long time. I am not going to write down what I think about. The thoughts are not productive thoughts. The thoughts are the kind of thoughts Surge has been waiting on the other side of his chapel quiet to have with me whenever I am ready to have them, and he has been polite enough not to push, but the thoughts are there in the back of me and they are going to be there for the rest of my life until they are no longer thoughts and they are an action that has been completed.

We will not be telling her about this yet.

We will not be telling her about most things yet.

The most we are going to do today, I decide, is let her wake up into a room that has been quiet for her, and let her see two men who are not going to do anything to her that she has not asked for, and let her hear her own name back from us when she gives it. Everything else is for later. Everything else is for the days and weeks that come after.

That is the plan.

It is a soft plan.

It is the only plan I have.

---

The door opens behind me.

Not Paloma's door — the front door, the porch door, the door that someone has just pushed open without knocking. I turn. Surge is on his feet inside me before my eyes are on the door, and my body is half out of the chair before my brain has decided whether it is going to be a threat, and the back room door is opening behind me too because Soren has heard the front and Soren does not sleep through doors.

It is Tamsin.

I go slack. Surge goes slack. Soren in the doorway behind me goes slack. The three of us all unwind in the same single beat and Tamsin sees us do it and gives us the small disgusted face she has been giving us since she was twelve.

"Relax," she says. "It's me."

"You don't knock."

"I knock at Mom's. I don't knock here. Paloma loves me." She closes the door behind her — quietly, because Tamsin is a sixteen-year-old hellion but she is not stupid — and stands in the entry of the room and *sees*.

She sees the bed first. She sees the girl on the bed.

Her face does something.

I have watched Tamsin's face do a lot of things in sixteen years of being her older brother. I have watched her face do *bored*, *furious*, *delighted*, *terrified*, *manipulating-my-brother-into-buying-me-something*, and a special version of *I'm-about-to-do-something-Mom-is-going-to-yell-at-me-for-tomorrow*. I have never watched her face do this one.

She walks across the room.

She does not look at us. She does not look at Soren in the back room doorway. She does not look at me in the chair. She walks straight to the side of the bed where my old empty chair is and she looks down at the girl in the bed for a long beat.

Then she sits.

She does not ask if she can sit. She sits in the empty chair like the chair has been waiting for her, and she looks at the girl in the bed up close, and her face does *the thing* again, the one I do not have a word for.

She says, quietly, without looking at me: "Oh."

Just that. One word. *Oh*.

I look at Soren. Soren is looking at Tamsin. Soren looks at me. Soren shrugs the smallest possible shrug a man can shrug while standing in a doorway. We have no idea what just happened.

Tamsin sits with the girl for what feels like a long time and is maybe two minutes. She does not touch her. She does not speak. She just looks, the way a person looks at a fact that is in the process of rearranging something inside her.

Then she stands up.

She walks back across the room. She stops in front of me. She looks down at me in the chair and I have the absurd and instantaneous experience of being a nineteen-year-old man being judged by his sixteen-year-old sister and finding the judgment correct.

Tamsin says: "I am going to come back when she wakes up."

I say: "All right."

Tamsin says: "I am not going to fight either of you about her. I want you to know that. I am also not going to fight Mom about her, and Mom is going to know that too. I am bringing food when I come back. Soren needs to eat. So do you. You both look like you have been bled out and resoaked."

"Thank you, Tamsin."

"You're welcome, Cassian."

She looks at Soren. Soren has come fully out of the back-room doorway now and is leaning against the frame. Tamsin says, to him, in a voice softer than I have heard her use on her brother in five years: "Soren."

He says: "Tamsin."

She crosses to him. She does the thing she does when she has decided someone she loves is not currently okay, which is to put both hands flat on his sternum, look up at him, hold for three seconds, and step back. He takes the three seconds. He breathes.

She steps back. She looks at me again over her shoulder. "An hour. I will bring food. I will bring water. I will not bring anyone else." She opens the door. "Do *not* let Lorelei in here."

She leaves.

Soren and I stand in the room.

"Lorelei," Soren says, after a long beat.

"Yeah."

"How does she know."

"She does not know. She is sixteen. She has lived in this pack for sixteen years and watched Lorelei be Lorelei for the last four. She is making the same call we would have made if we had had time to make it."

"We have not made it yet."

"We are making it now."

"We are not letting Lorelei in here."

"No."

"Or in the family quarters."

"No."

"Or within fifty feet of her at any point ever."

"No."

We do not say more about it. We do not need to. The bond carries the decision between us and the decision lands and the decision is *made*, the way the third item on a list of three sometimes lands without anybody having to make a case for it.

---

I sit back down.

Soren stays in the doorway for a minute and then comes over and sits in his own chair beside mine, instead of going back to the cot. I do not argue. He is not lying down again and I knew he was not going to. Tamsin has come and gone and given him the three seconds with her hands on his chest that he apparently needed, and now he is back at the bedside, and I am not going to be the one to send him away from her again.

The room is quiet. The morning light is fully up. The bond hums.

The bed.

I look at her face. She is still asleep but the breathing is deeper now than it was an hour ago, and the small almost-pink in her cheeks is steady, and her left hand on the blanket has moved a fraction — closer to the chair I had been sitting in, the chair I left empty in case she looked.

She is going to wake up today.

I know it the way Surge knows things he does not have to be told. Her body is climbing back up out of where it has been, and the climb is going to deliver her to consciousness sometime in the next few hours, and when it does she is going to open her eyes and she is going to see me and Soren and she is going to ask, with her actual voice for the first time, where she is and who we are and what is happening to her.

We are going to have to answer.

I have spent the last hour deciding what we will and will not say.

I do not yet have all of it.

I have most of it.

---

Soren, beside me, says — very quietly, without taking his eyes off her: "Cassian."

"Yes."

"When she wakes."

"Yes."

"We do not tell her about the bond."

"No."

"We do not tell her she is our mate."

"No."

"We do not let her wake up into the words *Alpha* or *Luna* or *pack*. We let her wake up into a room where two men are kind to her and ask her name."

"Yes."

"And nothing else."

"Nothing else, Soren. For days, if she needs the days. We let her decide what she is going to ask us. We answer what she asks. Nothing more."

"Good."

We sit. The light fills the room. The bond hums.

I am exhausted in a way I have not been exhausted in my life and I am also more *here* in this chair beside this woman than I have ever been anywhere, and I think — I let myself think it once, clearly, because the thought has been pushing at me since the trees and it is going to push harder until I let it have its moment —

I think: *I have spent nineteen years being someone whose job was to be ready for her. I did not know that was the job. The job is what the job has always been.*

I will not say it out loud. I will not say it to Soren, even through the bond, even silently. The thought is mine and I keep it.

The bond hums.

She breathes.

The morning light comes up the rest of the way.

We wait.