39. Chapter 39

Chapter 39

“ T his doesn’t feel right, Mika,” Runa said, her wariness plain.

Mikael leaned against the wall and sighed. A housekeeper standing between them dug a keyring from her apron and started sorting through its contents.

“I’m not worried about right anymore.”

No one else was in the residential wing, at least, as they broke into Cyril’s room .

With a key.

In their own home.

His mother still couldn’t look past how ridiculous it sounded.

“It’s been nearly two days, and if that useless fuck can’t be bothered to get her out of there before the pyre…”

“Mikael,” she intoned, features pinched as she rubbed at her brow, “they are both grieving a loss that I cannot even fathom and—”

“And she could be fucking dead in there for all we know.” He threw a hand towards Cyril’s door and his mother fixed him with a lethal stare.

“Do. Not. Even—”

“Ah, Your Majesties?” The poor housekeeper standing between them with an uneasy look on her face held up a key. “This is for Lady Cyril’s room.”

She made no move to unlock the door, and his mother took a step back as she said, “This is all you, my boy.”

Mikael sighed and took the key from the maid. The lock turned over easily, and the maid was gone the instant the key was back in her hands.

“Well?” Runa looked at him and then eyed the door expectantly. He scoffed. “We’ve come this far, open the damn door and let’s make sure she’s all right.”

It wasn’t easy to ignore the anxious feeling that surged up through him, but he smothered it down as he clasped the handle and turned it.

She was fine, he told himself, because there just wasn’t another option. Nothing bad had happened to her. She just needed time and probably had just cried herself to sleep. She hadn’t drowned in the bath. Or drank herself to death. Or hurt—

The door wouldn’t budge.

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” he grumbled as he leaned his weight against it and pushed. The wood groaned but didn’t yield.

“It’s stuck?” his mother asked from her safe distance of observation.

“Very.” Mikael took a step back and stopped to think.

More force didn’t seem like the answer, as much as he felt like just throwing himself against the door until it came off its hinges. He wouldn't put it past Cyril to have barricaded herself in with every bit of damn furniture in the room.

And if going through the door wasn’t an option…

“Wait here,” he said to his mother as he handed her his jacket and started heading back down the hall.

He didn’t even need to look back to know how unimpressed she was when she called out, “And where are you going?!”

Maybe it wasn’t the most well-thought-out idea Mikael ever had.

His front half was filthy and soaked through by the time he finished scaling the drainpipe running alongside Cyril’s balcony. It would be his luck that they’d just had nearly an entire day of rain. But it was fine because all that separated him from the reassurance he desperately needed was a set of already half-open patio doors.

At least one thing decided it wanted to work in his favor.

“Cyr?” he called out in a harsh whisper as he slipped through the doors. The room was dim, lit only by the fleeting traces of evening light.

Silence and damp, frigid air answered him.

He sidestepped the writing desk beside her patio doors, half pulled out from the wall with a tipped-over water jug on it, and slid a couple of discarded cushions out of the way with his foot.

Not only was the room freezing, but it was a fucking mess .

Admittedly, he was a little distracted during his last visits to her room, but this felt entirely wrong.

Books and linens and things he couldn’t quite make out in the shadows were tossed about everywhere, and an overturned armchair occupied the center of the room. And all it took to bar entrance to her room was the chair from her writing desk, jammed under the door handle, and a couple of slim books wedged beneath the door.

“Cyr, are you in here?” Mikael asked again, as gently as his budding guilt would allow.

Fuck giving her space. He never should have waited this long to check on her.

That unease swelled something fierce when his eyes caught on dark droplets woven in circling paths amongst her discarded belongings.

Blood.

Not pools or lakes of it, thank the fucking gods, but enough splatter to raise concern.

He passed her empty bed, the linens half torn back and spotted with blood, and was moving towards her bathroom when a nagging itch compelled him to take one more look back.

From this angle, he glimpsed the gleaming black of the crown of her head, just in front of the sofa, and all the air left his lungs.

Slowly, he stepped around a discarded cushion and blanket, rounding another armchair, and Cyril was just…sitting there. Her eyes had a chilling vacancy in them, set on the burned-out hearth in front of her. She had her knees drawn up and a cloth-wrapped hand cradled against her chest. Oblivious to his presence.

Mikael kneeled beside her and Cyril’s eyes drifted over to him, all dark and brandished gold, and she blinked.

Once.

Twice.

One corner of her mouth tugged upwards, just slightly.

Mikael let out a slow breath.

“Hey, wrath.” He smiled as he brushed his hand up her shin.

No flinch, no movement, no reaction.

Even though her eyes fixed themselves on his face, it was like she was looking right through him.

He kept his tone soft as he said, “Something happened to your hand?”

Cyril’s lips parted and clamped back shut in a flash. She glanced down at her hand, at the cloth blotched with rusty brown, and nodded when she looked back up at him.

Oh. Something was very, very wrong.

Words were not something she usually had a short supply of.

“Can I look at it?”

She nodded again and extended her hand to him, her movements stiff.

He unwrapped the cloth slowly, turn by turn, until he uncovered a jagged wound that ran on an angle across her palm and, gods , it dipped all the way between her first two fingers. It surfaced on the back of her hand too, and had Mikael grimacing.

The entire gash looked half-healed, half-angry-as-hell, and it must have hurt like a bitch.

He hadn’t seen any broken glass or knives when he came in though, which begged the question of how…but Mikael was more preoccupied with the icy chill of her skin.

There wasn’t a lick of an ember left in that hearth. It must have been over a day since it died out, and gods knows how long of that she spent just—

“I didn’t mean to.”

Cyril’s voice came as a hoarse rasp as she pulled her hand back, and her eyes… Why did she look so afraid all of a sudden?

“That’s okay, Cyr,” he said as he sat back on his heels and watched her. “I’ll be right back with something to clean that up, alright?”

Cyril nodded absently, the wound across her palm having stolen her attention away from him. She flexed her fingers with a wince, turning her hand from side to side, as he got up and went over to the door.

If he wasn’t so fucking worried about whatever was going on in that beautiful head of hers, he might’ve taken a moment to appreciate the amount of force she put into jamming that chair under the door handle.

He leaned it against the wall and wrenched out the two books jammed under the door. Hopefully, Fae Ascension: The Sixth Edition and Considerations of Ascension weren’t of any real value to Cyril or the archives, because their bent-back covers and pages looked past salvaging.

Mikael took a slow breath as he opened the door because he knew, waiting on the other side—

“It took you long enough,” his mother hissed, trying to peer past him and into the room as light poured into the entryway. “She’s there?”

“Because you would’ve climbed up there so much faster...” Mikael closed the door behind him, scrubbing a hand over his face. “And yes, she is, but she has a wicked cut on her hand that needs dealing with. Can you get a medkit while I get her fire going again?”

All the annoyance slipped from his mother’s face.

“Oh. Of course, let me—” She had already taken a step away when she stopped. “She’s alright though, besides…?”

Mikael shook his head.

“No, she’s not. I mean…” He exhaled a shaky breath. “Physically, yes, I think so. But mentally…”

His mother smiled empathetically.

“That’s to be expected. I know it’s difficult to see someone you care about grief-stricken like that, but she’ll get through it in time—”

“That’s not what I mean.” Mikael sighed. “It’s like…she’s not all here .” He tapped his temple. “Like she’s dazed or something…”

Runa pursed her lips and nodded like that made complete sense to her.

“Go deal with the fire and I’ll be back with a kit.”