Crimson Veil

Chapter Twenty-One — Something Shifts

✦ Eve's POV ✦

It happened on a Wednesday.

I know it was a Wednesday because I had spent the morning in the ward doing intake rotation and Wednesday intake always ran long — the soldiers who had been quietly ignoring minor injuries through the weekend typically arrived on Wednesday with those injuries having developed opinions — and by the time the afternoon session in the command room came around I had been on my feet for six hours and my eyes felt like they were made of something heavier than usual.

The session went well. Two extensions, both clean, both producing useful information — a corridor in Third Division that had a higher density of managed emotional signatures than it should, which suggested either a meeting point or a communication route. Adam noted it without expression and Caine added it to the map with his usual precision.

At some point between the second extension and the debrief I sat down in the chair by the window and closed my eyes for what I intended to be thirty seconds.

I woke up to the sound of the evening bell.

For a moment I didn't know where I was — the quality of the light was wrong for the healers' quarters and the chair I was in was not my bunk and there was a warmth across my shoulders that took me a second to identify.

A coat.

Someone had put a coat across my shoulders while I slept.

I sat very still for a moment. The command room was quiet — Caine was gone, the maps on the table had been rolled and stacked, the lamp on Adam's desk was burning low. Adam himself was at the table with a report in his hands, reading in the near-dark with the calm of someone who had been doing exactly that for some time and saw no reason to change anything about the situation.

He hadn't woken me up.

He had put his coat over me and gone back to work and let me sleep for — I calculated quickly — nearly two hours.

I sat with that for a long moment. The coat was heavy and warm and smelled of him — something cold and clean underneath, like winter air — and the evening bell was still fading and the lamplight was gold and steady and everything about the moment had a quality of stillness that I didn't want to disturb.

But he looked up.

He saw that I was awake. His expression did its usual thing — giving very little away, but present, attentive. He looked at me in the lamplight for a moment.

"You needed it," he said. Before I could say anything. Before I could thank him or question it or do any of the things that the moment seemed to call for.

You needed it. Simple. Final. The way he said things that were true and didn't require elaboration.

"I did," I said.

The evening bell finished fading. The lamp held steady.

I kept the coat across my shoulders until I had to leave, and when I stood to go I folded it carefully and set it on the table and he picked it up without comment and the whole thing was so quiet and so ordinary and so completely not ordinary at all that I walked back to the healers' quarters feeling like I was carrying something fragile.

Sera was sitting on her bunk when I came in. She took one look at me and said nothing, which meant she saw everything.

"Don't," I said.

"I didn't say a word," she said, with great innocence.

"Sera."

"I'm just sitting here."

"You're sitting there very loudly."

She smiled — warm and genuine and not unkind — and reached over and squeezed my hand once and let it go. "Okay," she said. "I won't say anything."

She didn't have to. We both already knew.

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