CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 17

AUREN

That chilled premonition doesn’t takelong to come into effect.

I barely have time to slip off the boots next to the fireplace when I hear someone come up behind me, and I automatically tense.

“Lady Auren.”

I spin around, surprise making my eyebrows jump. “Hojat?”

The army mender is wearing borrowed clothes that are a bit too big on him, his brown hair longer than the last time I saw him. The dragged-down scarring of his eye seems more pronounced from the lighting of the fire, his skin mottled with red and white.

“It’s good to see you awake,” the mender says, wearing a soft, crooked smile. “How are you feeling?”

The answer is automatic. “I’m fine.”

Hojat tuts as he comes over to me, giving Slade a nod in passing. “Come into the bedroom, please, so I can look you over.”

Every muscle from my toes to my neck goes tense.

“No, thank you, really.”

His burned mouth creases into a frown. “My lady, I understand it is sensitive, but this is for your health, and I must—”

“I said I’m fine.” My hands go to the coat I’m wearing, pulling it tighter around me like a wraparound shield. Even to me, the I’m fine sounds like a collection of lies. A platitude of denial made up of heated stalling and forced ignoring.

Hojat’s eyes flick over to Slade, and they seem to communicate something silently between them. A thick hesitation fills up the room, pushing up against me like a turbulent wave come to knock me under.

“It’s imperative, Lady Auren,” Hojat says carefully, and I hate the pity I see in his eyes, because it certainly doesn’t bode well for me. “You do not want infection to set in.” His accent pulls at his t’s like his tongue wants to drag them under, but the only thing dragging me under is this descending panic.

I can’t have him look at me.

I just can’t.

Because if he does, then I won’t be able to keep ignoring...that.

As if it knows my conscious thoughts are skating around it, my back suddenly twinges with a sharp, prodding pain. I suck in a breath, my very inhale braced against the barbs in my chest.

“Auren, Hojat will be gentle,” Slade tells me, but he doesn’t get it. There is nothing gentle about this. What he’s asking me to face is rough hate and slashed violence. What he’s asking me for is to take on a soul-deep trauma that I want to keep ignoring.

He wants to yank out the stopper holding in my anguish while I’m still desperately trying to keep my fingers pressed to the cork.

I’ve just been told I have rot inside me, but maybe it’s not his fault at all. Maybe it’s mine. Maybe the things that have happened to me, the things I’ve done, are the reason that the rot stayed rooted inside of me.

“I don’t care if he’s gentle,” I say, turning around to shove my feet back into the boots. I don’t even bother to do up the laces, because I just need to get away. Out there, in the depths of the cave, where its secrets stay hidden and depths stay untouched. “I’m going back out.”

“Auren—”

“He’s not looking me over, and I’m going back out to the fucking cave!” I shout, chest heaving, my cheeks flared with angry, defensive heat—heat that I cling to, because I can’t bear to plummet into the ice-cold reality of loss.

Why can’t they just let it be? Why are they being so horrible and pushy? I just need to stay in that cave. Because I can’t, I can’t—

“My lady.”

It’s barely above a whisper.

But that hoarse, quiet voice makes everything in me suddenly grind to a jarring, weighty halt.

Slowly, I turn around, and my entire world tunnels down to the person standing slouched in the doorway.

“Digby.”

He doesn’t move. Doesn’t speak.

For a second, we simply look at each other.

He’s been a tight coil in my chest, a leak in my heart that’s been stoppered along with the rest. I can’t even fathom that he’s here. In the crevices of my mind’s cavern, he was there, buried in the shadows dark enough that I wouldn’t have to face the grief of loss. But he’s here. Somehow, he’s gone ahead and stepped out of the corners and come out safe and sound.

The wet blur that fills my eyes distorts him, so I blink furiously, forcing myself not to cry, because I need to see him properly, need to assure myself that he’s okay.

But he’s not.

He might be safe and sound and here, but he’s not unscathed.

His face is made up of mangled blotches. All different colored bruises, their shades marking the severity of the swelling beneath. His brown eyes have a haunted look in them that they didn’t before, his gray beard and hair so disheveled that it doesn’t even resemble my tidy, stoic guard. I don’t miss the way he’s leaning against the arched doorway, the arm wrapped tentatively around his waist, the padding of wraps beneath his shirt.

“You’re here,” I say, my voice sounding like I’m standing on quaking ground. “I thought I...in that room. You were there, and I just... I mean, I was so afraid that I... Did I...?” The choppy question stands on tenterhooks, balancing on the edge I’m too afraid to peer over.

Did I hurt him?

Did I hurt anyone else I care about?

The coil condenses and tightens in my chest, reeling around my ribs, keeping it too taut for a single breath.

Digby frowns at my question like he’s not sure what I mean, but it’s Slade who answers. “No, Auren. You didn’t hurt him or any of us.”

A whoosh of relief passes over me, but I don’t miss the way he said that I didn’t hurt any of us. He didn’t say I didn’t hurt anyone, because that would be a lie.

“My lady,” Digby says, making my eyes hook back to him instantly. “Let the mender care for your wounds.”

I go rigid, my head shaking.

When he hobbles a step forward, his face contorts into a grimace. Hojat starts to rush over to go help him. “You should really be in bed, Sir Digby…”

My stubborn guard holds up his hand to ward him off, and with painstaking steps, he limps all the way over to me. When he stops in front of me, when we’re eye to eye, he just stands here, watching me.

No words. No argument or reasoning. He doesn’t need them. There’s so much more right there in his watery gaze.

Simply looking back at him makes my heart squeeze into itself, makes my ears scream with memory.

Miss Auren.

I’m going to save you.

Hold her.

You brought this on yourself, Auren.

Then, the screams.

It’s all there. In the deepest, sharpest crevices. In the most frightening, sunken-in abyss. The sound of a sword swinging through the air. The explosion of pain. A spinning room. Rough, strong arms holding me down. Blots in my vision. Howls torn through my throat. That whistling blade, coming down again and again and again.

And this man standing in front of me, he’s watching it replay right along with me. That haunted shadow in his eyes is cast from the very same shadows, because he was there. He saw every second of it. The two of us were the only ones who were in that room, and the truth is, I’m not sure if either of us will ever truly be able to get out of it.

That’s the thing with trauma to the body—it shows up instantly. In breaks and bruises, in burns and in blood. But the trauma on the inside, that’s harder to see. It creeps around your mind, poisons you with disquiet. It can hit you out of nowhere, debilitating and ruinous. There are no marks visible for those. None, save the shadows in your eyes.

Finally, within the recesses of those shared shadows, Digby speaks. “You’ve got to have it looked at, my lady.”

No one, save him, would’ve been able to do this. To break down this one wall I have constructed around such a painful piece. It must’ve been keeping my spine upright, because as soon as it comes tumbling down, so do my shoulders. I ache as the bricks of refusal rain down at my feet, showing me exactly the sort of rubbled ruin I truly am. And to think, this is only a single wall.

When I say nothing, Digby gives me a firm look. “It’s got to be done.”

With the debris useless and scattered, I have nothing to hold up my resolve. Not with the recognition of his gaze. So I swallow hard and say, “Okay.”

Because I can’t say no to him. I can’t look him in the eye and say I’m fine. I could with the others, but not him, not when we were both in that room.

Digby steps aside, deferring to Hojat. “This way, my lady,” the mender tells me.

My numbness comes off in layers as I walk down the hallway. It feels like dead skin peeling away, left in a scattered trail behind me.

By the time I reach the borrowed bedroom I woke up in, I’m already raw. When Hojat covers me with a sheet so I can slip off my shirt, my body starts to tremble. When he has me lie face-down on the bed, my skin breaks out into a cold sweat.

Slade stays at my side, his hand gripping mine, and I squeeze and squeeze, because his touch is the only thing that’s steady against my convulsing rupture, but I also can’t bear for him to see. “Don’t look at them,” I say quietly, my voice a plea.

I don’t know if he already saw, but I can’t stand him looking at it now. Can’t stand for him to see what’s no longer there. At the wounds left behind.

His jaw muscle strains, but he gives a nod, his eyes never leaving mine, never straying down my spine.

I turn my head on the pillow, and there’s Digby, standing guard at the door like he’s done my whole life. Face grim, mouth quiet.

One of these males watches over me, the other sees right through me, no matter where I tell him to look.

“Alright, Lady Auren, I’m starting now,” Hojat says quietly.

I brace myself, but I could never really be ready. The pain is hot and angry, almost bitter at how I’ve tried to ignore it, ready to lash out in punishment.

The first pass of Hojat’s gentle hands as he starts to clean the wounds makes my spine bow up in shocking pain, and I suck in a noisy breath.

Every single swipe of his rag, every trickle of water and the herbal smell that fills my nose, I feel it all with stark alertness. But I feel the phantom pains of what happened in that room, too. The lightning bolts of agony that cut through those pieces of me, leaving me to bleed out onto the floor in golden tatters.

It’s the smell of herbs tainted with the memory of metallic blood.

It’s the dipping of his water mixture wrung out in the bowl that’s morphed into the sound of blood dripping into a puddle.

It’s the swipe of his motions merged with the swipe of the sword.

It’s Digby watching me now, just as he was then.

But it’s the window that really does me in. The dark glass may as well be a mirror for how well it reflects. And with my face turned toward it, there’s no hiding away from the sight of my exposed back.

It looks so empty. Devoid. When I see it like this, the true reality of my loss slams into me full-force in a way it hasn’t before. Because I wouldn’t let myself think of it. But now, I can’t ignore it. Because there it is, like scalloped edges jutting from my back that I can no longer cling to.

They’re gone.

I don’t have their comforting hug around my middle or their graceful twirls along the floor. I don’t have the satiny brushes against my skin or the steadying weight at my back. They’ve been taken away, hacked away like a length of hair, leaving me to ache with the loss. All that’s left are two rows of jagged, throbbing stubs that bleed and fray in the wake of what they once were.

And it’s right here, right in this moment, that the pent-up sob finally tears past my lips. My stopper is yanked out, and there are no denials, no I’m fines. There isn’t a cave in the world that’s deep enough for me to hide away from this.

Because I’ve passed the point of no return now, and it’s not just that there’s no going back—it’s that my back doesn’t even exist anymore.

Eruptive emotion pushes out of me, so loud I feel it must burst from the house and echo through the cave. As if it cries with me.

And everything, everything,comes spilling out. Like a broken bottle, its contents leaked past the cracks.

Truth be told, I don’t know if I’ll ever feel full again.

I sob and I grieve, and it’s not subtle or quiet, but a violent wracking of mourning that digs itself out of me and lands in a messy, hurtful heap. But all the while, Slade squeezes my hand and Digby stands watch.

I may be empty, but I am not alone.

And that, at least, is something.