Chapter 9: Small Progress
798 Words
I found Nessa in the corridor outside my room that evening, arranging a fresh tray of bandages with more focus than the task required, and something about the tightness in her shoulders told me she had been waiting for me rather than simply working.
"You did well today," she said, without looking up. "In the hearing."
"Was that meant as a compliment?"
"I am not certain yet." She finally met my eyes, and whatever careful neutrality she had worn since our first meeting had cracked slightly, just enough for something more honest to show through. "My brother died in a Silverwood raid four years ago. I have spent four years hating your pack with my whole chest. It is strange to stand here now and find myself less certain than I was this morning."
I did not know what to say to that. Grief was not something I could argue with, and I did not try. "I'm sorry about your brother."
"Everyone is sorry. Sorry does not undo raids on either side." She said it without heat, more tired than angry, and gathered the tray to leave. At the door she paused. "For what it is worth, my lady, I do not think you are what the pack has been telling itself you are. That does not mean I trust you yet."
"That's fair," I said. "I'm not sure I trust any of you yet either."
Something that might have been the start of a real smile crossed her face before she disappeared down the corridor, and I stood there a moment longer than necessary, turning the exchange over in my mind. Small progress, if it was progress at all. I had learned enough in eighteen years of pack politics to know that one conversation with one maid did not undo generations of hatred, but it was something, and I found myself oddly grateful for it.
Damian found me still standing in the corridor when he returned from whatever business had kept him after the hearing, his expression carrying the particular exhaustion of a man who had spent the afternoon managing people rather than problems.
"Selene," he said, before I could ask. "She wanted to discuss the terms of ending our engagement formally. It went about as well as you would expect."
"Is she going to be difficult about it?"
"I don't know yet. She has every right to be angry. I made her a promise years ago that I cannot keep now, through no fault of either of ours, and I do not think fault matters much to someone standing in the wreckage of a future they had already planned around." He said it plainly, without excusing himself, and something about the honesty of it caught at me the way it kept doing, more often than I wanted to admit.
"You could have handled that worse."
"I could have handled a lot of things worse today. I am trying very hard not to, for whatever that is worth to you."
"It's worth something," I admitted, quieter than I meant to.
We stood there a moment too long, close enough that I could feel the low, steady pull of the bond doing something to my pulse that had nothing to do with training or discipline or any of the careful control I had spent eighteen years building. He was watching me with an intensity that should have felt invasive and instead felt like something closer to being seen properly for the first time in days, and some traitorous part of me leaned into it before I caught myself and stepped back.
"I should rest," I said. "My leg."
"Of course." He did not push, though something in his eyes told me he had noticed exactly what I was retreating from. "I'll have Nessa bring supper."
I lay awake a long time that night, in the bed we still shared out of necessity rather than choice, listening to his breathing settle into the slow rhythm of sleep beside me, and tried to sort through the tangle of feelings the day had left behind. Anger at being here at all. Grief for the home I had not chosen to leave. Something warmer and far more dangerous, growing quietly beneath both, that I did not yet have the courage to name.
I thought of my parents, somewhere south of here, learning by now exactly what had happened to their daughter in that valley. I thought of Kellan, and the particular ache of imagining his face when the news reached him. I thought, longer than I wanted to admit, of the weight of Damian's arm settling over my waist sometime deep in the night, and the fact that some quiet, unguarded part of me had not pulled away from it at all.
- Writer
