Crimson Veil

Chapter Seventeen — The Weight of It

✦ Eve's POV ✦

I did not go back to the healers' quarters that night.

I tried. I lay in my bunk for an hour listening to Sera's quiet breathing and the stronghold settling around me and the thoughts moving through my mind with the relentless quality of water finding every crack in a surface, and eventually I gave up and got up and put my coat on and went to the outer wall.

It was colder than it had been. The kind of cold that had intention to it, the first real edge of deep winter making itself known. I sat on the ledge with my knees drawn up and my breath coming out in small clouds and I let myself actually feel the weight of what I had learned.

Forty years.

Aldric had been building this for forty years. He had been a junior officer when the Crimson Veil was a dormant thing, a remnant, barely breathing — and he had found it and fed it and grown it with the patience of someone who thought in decades rather than seasons. He had placed people inside every division. He had stolen an artifact that could turn a gift like mine into a weapon. He had known about me since my third day here.

And he hadn't moved yet. Because he was careful. Because he was intelligent. Because he was waiting for exactly the right moment, which was coming in six weeks or less.

I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes and breathed.

"You're going to get frostbite."

I looked up.

Adam was standing at the corner of the building in the dark, in his coat, with the particular quality of someone who had been there for a moment before speaking.

I lowered my hands. "You followed me."

"Bowen flagged that you'd left the quarters." He crossed to the ledge and sat down — not four feet away this time, closer, two feet, close enough that the warmth of him was perceptible in the cold air. "It's the second hour past midnight."

"I know what hour it is."

He looked at me. In the dark his eyes were unreadable but his attention was the same as always — that complete, particular quality that made everything else feel slightly less present.

"Tell me," he said.

Two words. The same two words he had used the night I came to him with Mira's revelation about Aldric and my gift. Simple. Direct. An opening rather than a demand.

And I found, to my own surprise, that I wanted to.

So I told him. Not the facts — he knew the facts, he had authorized Caine to share them — but the weight of them. What it felt like to understand that a man with forty years of patience and planning had known about me since my third day here. What it felt like to know that my gift — the thing I had spent ten years managing and hiding and being quietly afraid of — was precisely what made me valuable to someone like that. What it felt like to sit with the diagram of the mirror and understand in concrete terms what Aldric intended to do with me if he got the chance.

Adam listened.

He did not interrupt. He did not offer reassurance or perspective or the gentle redirection that people sometimes used when they were uncomfortable with someone else's fear. He sat in the cold beside me and listened with the full quality of his attention and let the words land without deflecting them.

When I finished there was a silence that was not uncomfortable.

"You're afraid," he said.

"Yes."

"Good."

I looked at him.

"People who aren't afraid of the right things make poor decisions," he said. The directness of it was not unkind. "You're afraid of the correct things in the correct proportion. That's useful."

I almost laughed. It surprised me enough that I pressed my lips together before it could escape, but something must have shown on my face because he watched it happen with that quality of attention.

"You're telling me my fear is strategically appropriate," I said.

"Yes."

"That is the least comforting comfort I have ever received."

"I'm not trying to comfort you," he said. "I'm telling you the truth. There's a difference."

I looked at him in the dark. The cold sat around us and his breath made small clouds in the air beside mine and I thought about what Mira had said — be careful with him — and understood with a clarity that was almost painful that careful was no longer a thing I was capable of being.

"What do we do?" I asked. "When he makes his move. When he comes to me with the offer Mira says he'll make — what do we do?"

"We let him believe it's working," he said. "We give him enough to feel secure. And then we take everything apart before he can use it." He paused. "Together."

That last word sat between us in the cold air.

Together.

He said it with the same evenness he said everything, no special weight placed on it, as though it were simply the logical and obvious conclusion. As though the question of whether I was doing this alone had already been answered and didn't need revisiting.

Something in my chest loosened in a way I hadn't expected.

"Alright," I said.

"Alright," he said.

We sat in the cold for a while longer. I didn't feel the need to fill it. Neither did he. The stronghold breathed around us and the winter dark pressed close and the weight of what was coming was still there — would always be there until it was over — but it was distributed differently now. Shared across two people rather than sitting entirely on one.

Eventually the cold became genuinely insistent.

"Go inside," he said.

"You too," I said, because his chest wound was three days old and the temperature was punishing and I was still technically his assigned healer.

He stood when I stood. We walked back to the door in the eastern wall side by side, close enough that the backs of our hands almost touched with every step.

Almost.

I went in first. He held the door. I looked back at him once, framed in the doorway with the cold dark behind him, and there was something in his face in that moment — something open, just briefly, that I had never seen there before.

Then he let the door close between us and I walked back to the healers' quarters and got into my bunk and pulled the blanket up and was asleep within minutes, which was the first time that had happened in days.

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