61. Chapter 61

Chapter 61

M ikael was certain his mother’s legs were going to give way when her eyes locked on Cyril. He had her somewhat settled on the plush little vanity stool in her bathroom, propped between the wall and counter, when Runa eased through the half-open door.

Dressed in her simple, dark base layers, she swore softly.

“Mika, no…” his mother murmured as she walked over. She brushed the back of her hand down Cyril’s cheek and frowned. “What can I do?”

“I just need help , I…” From where he was crouched at Cyril’s feet, his hands splayed over her knees, Mikael sighed. Quietly, he added, “I don’t know what to do.”

And he didn’t mean in the literal sense—Cyril needed to be cleaned up and put to bed. That much was simple.

But Mikael had taken one look at her in the light—at the torn blouse he forgot was fucking white , with how saturated in blood it was, and the bruises forming around her wrists that he knew could only mean one thing—and the gravity of what happened had his entire body in a fucking chokehold.

“Let’s clean up her face first, alright?” Runa gave Mikael a soft, sad smile. “One thing at a time.”

Mikael hadn’t even seen her move, but his mother had already dug out a cloth from gods know where and was at the sink, holding her hand underneath the stream of water.

She made everything seem so easy.

Like he wasn’t looking up at the half-lucid woman who was more important to him than fucking breathing. Like it hadn’t even been hours since he sat with her in a pool of her own blood, not knowing if she was going to fucking die.

“Do you want to, or—?”

Runa held the wet cloth towards him, but Mikael shook his head.

He was terrified of hurting her more than he already had.

Mikael pried himself away from Cyril and gave his mother room to work.

She touched Cyril’s chin and eased her head back against the wall. Cyril’s features pinched in some sort of displeasure as his mother started dabbing and wiping at the blood that caked her entire face.

“Cyril, sweetheart?” Runa said, in that same gentle cadence she spoke to Cyril when they found her after Bron’s death. The last time that his mother had to clean her up after she was abandoned and left to fend for herself.

Cyril made a quiet noise.

Runa swept the cloth up to her forehead and patted a clean sliver of it down the side of her face—she was assessing as much as she was cleaning.

The damn cloth was burgundy already and barely half her face was clear.

“How are you feeling?”

“Tired,” Cyril sighed.

Her voice made every fiber of his being ache with guilt.

“I bet you are. You can rest as soon as we’re done getting you cleaned up.”

Runa folded the cloth over on itself and glanced towards Mikael, quietly saying, “My boy, can you find some scissors? We'll just cut her out of her clothes since they’re already ruined, and then I can take care of her hair.”

“Her hair ?” Mikael blinked at his mother and looked between her and Cyril. “I can wash it myself. I’ll take her into the bath and—”

“A chunk of her hair is missing , Mikael.”

For emphasis, his mother swept a piece in front of her shoulder that was significantly shorter than the rest. He hadn’t even realized…he just thought her braid had come apart and—

“ Mika ,” his mother hissed, waving the cloth towards the door. “Can you please go look for scissors? Check the desk.”

“Scissors, right. Gods, sorry , I—”

Mikael shook his head and blew out a shaky breath.

Rooting through anyone’s belongings was not something he enjoyed, especially not Cyril’s, but normalcy was out the fucking window. He slipped out into her room, pulled open the singular drawer of her desk, and sagged with a bit of relief as the silver handles slid into sight.

When he stepped back into the bathroom, his mother was already kneeling on the floor, untying Cyril’s boots.

And Cyril?

Her eyes fluttered open. She looked right fucking at him, and she smiled .

Well, maybe smile was a strong word—the corner of her mouth quirked.

But she could have been grinning for all he cared.

“Mika,” she said quietly, and his legs felt fucking weak.

Even his mother looked between the two of them with a shade of surprise on her face as she tossed the frayed strands of Cyril’s laces on the floor and worked off her boots.

“Hey, wrath.” He skimmed his knuckles down the side of her face, skirting past a nasty fucking bruise blooming across the swell of her cheek.

It was a blessing she lost the battle she waged to keep her eyes open because Mikael realized how fucking filthy he was in contrast to the now clean, snow-white skin of her face. Blood and dirt and gods only know what else caked every damn part of him, and her bathroom was looking as bad as one of the murder scenes.

Mikael set the scissors on the counter and took another washcloth to his face and neck, giving his hands a hasty scrub afterward.

“You’ll go in with her?” his mother asked as Mikael was halfway through unbuttoning his jacket and dumping all the odds and ends of his finery on the counter. He hadn’t even bothered to change when his father granted him leave from that fucking dinner. It was straight to the barracks, then the stables.

Mikael nodded before he pulled off his undershirt and worked his boots off. He’d at least do his mother the decency of keeping his pants on.

“How do you want to…?”

He looked at Runa, who tilted her head from side to side at Cyril, thinking.

“You hold her up and keep her steady.” She motioned for Mikael to come and take the spot she stood in. “I’ll take care of the rest.”

When he was capable of stringing more than a few words together, he’d have to thank his mother for making this all remarkably easy for him.

Cyril, mercifully, didn’t put up much of a fight as he hauled her upright from the stool, just slipping a petulant sort of groan as her body weight settled against him. She mumbled something after too, but coherency wasn’t something she had any grasp on.

His mother lifted Cyril’s braid and sighed—nearly half of it had been cut during whatever the fuck happened to her in that cellar, right around her shoulders.

He sincerely hoped Cyril meant it every time she said her hair drove her crazy.

“When she’s feeling up to it, I’ll have someone come and fix it properly for her. But for now”—Runa grimaced as she started working the scissors through the other half of the braid—“this will have to do.”

Runa tossed the remnants of the braid onto the counter and started dismantling Cyril’s clothes.

She ran the scissors up the back of her ruined blouse and pushed the two halves over Cyril’s shoulders and down her arms, hanging limp at her sides. The blood-soaked silk hit the floor beside them, and her simple, black breast band followed a second later.

His mother tsked quietly, shaking her head.

“What is it?” Mikael asked, peering down at Cyril’s back—mottled in purple and filthy, as he knew it would be.

“The bruising, Mika,” Runa said with a breath of disbelief. “That Wren couldn’t mend it all… I knew things were dire, but…”

She shook her head again and sank to her knees in silence.

Mikael was thankful for that silence too.

The condition he found Cyril in was a subject he did not feel like broaching at the moment. Maybe never, truthfully. Just the mention of it had a tight, aching feeling crawling up his spine that he fought to ignore.

Runa cut the last of Cyril’s destroyed pants free from her legs, sweeping them, her underclothes and shirt, and Mikael’s dirty clothes into her arms.

“She’s all yours now.” His mother glanced between him and Cyril and a sad smile formed on her face. “I’ll find you both some clean clothes and be back soon.”

Mikael had nothing other than base instinct guiding him as he gathered Cyril up into his arms and carried her over to the bath. She stirred as he eased down a single step at a time into the gently steaming water, pressing her face into his bare chest.

A single act that quelled the simmering thing inside of him that wanted to scream.

“What’re you…”

Her hoarse and grumbled words gave way to a hearty groan when Mikael sank them both into the warmth of the water. Even for the size of the bath, the water tinged crimson in an instant. Streaks of blood eddied away from the both of them as he walked over to the seating ledge on the far end of the basin.

“I’m giving you a bath because you’re filthy.”

“Oh.” She smiled—a fucking proper , dimple-forming smile—and her hand traveled up, splaying across the crook of his neck. Her fingers dug in weakly, and Mikael was glad they were already sitting. “Thank you.”

“Of course, wrath. Anything for you.”

Cyril just hummed.

It brought Mikael no small amount of displeasure to pry that soothing press of her flesh away from him, to dip her head back in the water and run his fingers through her blood-crusted hair. He focused on the sheet of black silk it became in the darkening water, desperate to keep his eyes and his mind away from the bruises around her neck.

They were going to drive him fucking mental.

Mikael tucked her back against his chest, to wash away the other reminders of the day he couldn’t have fathomed when she was nothing but sleepy smiles that morning.

He worked his fingers in feather-light sweeps up her arms and legs, across the thinning muscles of her back and stomach, rubbing away the more persistent smudges of blood and dirt and gore. He tried to not let his touch linger on the expanses of fresh, uneven scars on her thigh and waist.

When he was done, Mikael tipped Cyril’s face up and he kissed her.

Just a soft, affectionate touch, fueled by the selfish urge to soothe his soul a bit. But her eyes tracked him, half-hooded with rings of glimmering gold peeking out, and another smile tugged at her lips. A weapon that she wielded so damn effortlessly.

When she shifted, nestling her face into the crook of his neck, Mikael let out a shaky breath.

“You scared me today, wrath,” he said, because the silence felt suffocating.

“Why?” Her voice was so small, so tired.

“I thought I was going to lose you, and I’m not sure what I’d do without you.”

That was the frightening truth he’d come face-to-face with inside that cellar.

Cyril had been in his life for only months now, but he couldn’t imagine the possibility of it without her. She was everything to him, and the prospect of a future where she wasn’t the first thing he saw in the morning, or the last thing at night, wasn’t something he could come to terms with.

Cyril made a quiet, contemplative noise, but he didn’t get anything else out of her. And that was alright, because it wasn’t the time to pour out his undying feelings, not when he couldn’t fathom where to even begin.

So he held her instead. Kept every inch of her frame tucked safely against him, exactly where she belonged, until his mother’s voice carried through the bathroom door.

“Mika? Can I come in?”

The water in the basin was filthy and murky crimson, but he would’ve sat in here for another hour if it meant he got to keep holding Cyril. The filtration would catch up, eventually.

Runa knocked on the door.

“Come in,” he called out.

Mikael gathered Cyril up and started moving towards the submerged steps—he wasn’t looking forward to any bit of what was to come.

“These are for you,” his mother said as she nudged open the door and set a pile of clothing on the bathroom counter. She grabbed a plush, white towel from one of the side racks and held it open at the top of the steps. “I’ll take her out there and get her dressed and into bed while you get cleaned up and dried off.”

She glanced at the sopping wet pants that were now weighing him down as he climbed up the steps.

Point taken.

Mikael tried to ignore the whimper that left Cyril when he eased her down onto her feet, her body swaying uneasily as his mother wrapped a towel around her and tucked it in on itself. Those whimpers continued, rolling into protesting whines as Runa pulled Cyril’s arm across her shoulders, bearing the brunt of her weight, and started leading her out of the bathroom in slow steps. Every pained noise she made felt like a physical blow.

Mikael waited until his mother made it through the door with her to peel off his wet clothes and give himself the hastiest wash down of his life.

By the time Mikael was clean and dressed, his mother had worked a miracle.

Not only was Cyril propped up in bed against a nest of pillows, but she was dressed in a dark tunic and shorts, and his mother was wrapping a bandage around her thigh. The room was warm and dimly lit, and a crate of what looked like medical supplies sat at his mother’s feet.

“It’s frightening how fast you—”

Mikael stilled when he got close enough to see Cyril’s face.

Her eyes glistened with tears and she coughed quietly into the sleeve she had pressed to her face. Miserable wouldn’t even scratch the surface of how she looked.

“Compliments later.” Runa's voice was clipped as she kept working the roll of bandage around Cyril’s thigh. The scent hit him then, of pungent medicinal ointment—like mint and clove, and something unpleasantly bitter. “She’s in a bit of pain, but the tonic the infirmary sent up for her should take effect soon.”

His mother kept talking, something or other about the properties of the ointment compound, but Cyril had every bit of his attention hooked. The waves of pain that crested in her face. The tears that just rolled down her cheeks.

His list of failures today was ever-growing.

He should have just carried her out here, wet clothes be damned.

Runa finished wrapping her thigh, and Cyril pulled away from her faster than Mikael thought she’d be able to. She shifted somewhat awkwardly onto her side, giving Mikael and his mother her back.

Cyril’s voice wavered as she said, “I’m tired.”

“I know you are, sweetheart.” His mother sighed. “We’re almost done, I just need to—”

“Let her sleep.” Mikael squeezed his mother’s shoulder.

He knew she meant well. She always did.

But everything was catching up with Cyril now.

Truthfully, he was shocked that she had any grasp on consciousness right now, let alone enough to be talking and moving, albeit sparingly.

The sidelong glance his mother cast him was begrudging at best, but her shoulders dropped and she stood. She pulled the covers up around Cyril, tucking her in with a sort of reverence that made Mikael have to turn away for a moment.

There was no doubt about whether she considered Cyril one of her own or not.

Runa didn’t let Mikael dwell on the aching sentimentality for long, though. She inclined her head towards the sofa by the fire and said, “Talk with me for a moment, before you join her?”

Mikael looked wistfully at the empty space in the bed beside Cyril that the fatigue and stress of the day had him desperate to crawl into. All he wanted now was to hold Cyril, if she’d let him, and feel her beating heart and breathing body against his. Have that steady reminder she was alive , and home, and at his side be what lulled him to sleep.

It would have to wait though.

He dropped onto the sofa and raked a hand through his damp hair, waiting as his mother gathered up all the supplies from the infirmary and set them off on Cyril’s desk.

“I don’t mean to corner you,” Runa said as she sat beside him, in that regal way of hers with her ankles crossed and her hands folded in her lap, “but will you explain to me what in the hells happened today? I was given very little to go on before pandemonium broke out here.”

She deserved an explanation more than anyone else, but Mikael did not feel like putting into words the series of fucked up events that had brought them to this moment.

Thankfully with his mother, words weren’t a necessity.

Runa tipped her head as he reached for her hands.

“You’ll show me?” she asked.

Mikael nodded, pulling the warmth of her palms to his temples.

Unlike with Cyril, there was no pageantry or preamble when his mother slipped into his mind, not with how many times she had done it by this point in his life. She always said that his darkness called to hers, as scant of a thread of it as he held.

Just a sharp sting of cold up the length of his spine, and she was in.

After that, it was easy to let his memories flow.

He started with Kaia, bearing the alarming news of their missing guards.

The infuriating conversation about resources with the general and his father.

That godsforsaken dinner and the moment he fucked up in the most immeasurable way—his conversation with Cyril.

Things became decidedly less easy after that.

“Cyril is gravely wounded. She was attacked, at one of the warehouses, and—”

Mikael didn’t think his heart could pound faster than it had when Ari first uttered those words. When his avian form dropped from the sky in a flash of light, intercepting Mikael on his ride into Brynnhold, he knew it wasn’t good. But nothing could have prepared him to hear those words.

Reliving it felt a thousand times worse.

Breathing became a laborious thing, with how fucking tight his chest felt. But the memories didn’t stop, and not because he was letting them flow.

No, his mother was pulling them.

Because once a skilled vefari was in your head, once they grabbed onto that thread of your subconscious mind, they didn’t leave until they wanted to.

Mikael didn’t want to see that cellar again.

He didn’t want to see Cyril sitting in a pool of her own blood, kneeling fucking helplessly at her side as death worked its greedy claws into her.

He didn’t want to see the bodies again—of his men, or that woman, or that fucking creature —or smell the blood and the decay.

But he did.

Because his mother wanted to— needed to see it all, he told himself, to stave off the nausea that rolled through him. Easier said than done though, as a tremor set in to his already sweating hands.

“Mother, that’s enough,” Mikael ground out, his voice hoarse, but she kept going. Through Cyril’s heart-rending plea to go home , through him holding her near lifeless body, through Wren arriving and— “ Enough .”

He couldn’t take it anymore, he couldn’t fucking breathe .

His mother left his mind with such urgency that a cold, piercing pain shot through the backs of his eyes.

“Mikael, I…” Runa was breathless as she stared at him. Her own pale blue eyes were wide, her lips parted for more words that never came.

Mikael lost the grip he had been holding for hours .

He choked back the sob that climbed its way up his throat and buried his face in his hands as his senses betrayed him in the worst fucking way. He could still hear those wet, rattling breaths she took. He could smell that sickening, copper tang of blood— her blood—and feel its slickness in the tears that fell onto his hands.

Mikael’s shoulders shook, and he cried . More than he was certain he ever had.

He cried because he failed Cyril. His people, his court, and everything he ever trusted in his damn life? They all fucking failed her.

He cried because there had been a genuine possibility that he would never see her smile again, or hear her laugh, or have her give him shit for one of the dozen reasons she found in a day. He would never see her flush and stammer when he teased her again, or see fire ignite in the addictive, sun-spun gold of her eyes.

And that? It was a reality he wasn’t sure he could have handled.

“Oh, my boy . It’s alright,” his mother murmured.

Her words and the hand she rubbed across his back brought him no comfort.

He huffed a bitter laugh and straightened up, wiping his face on his sleeve.

“Things are so fucking far from alright .” Mikael glanced over the back of the sofa, to where Cyril was nothing but a lump beneath the blankets on her bed. “I can’t fathom how scared she must have been, how much she fucking suffered, I—” He shook his head. “She nearly died because our court is run by cowards who are too fucking worried about disturbing the peace . My men died because those same fucking cowards won’t listen to a goddamned thing anyone else says. Things are not alright.”

Runa’s eyebrows pulled together, and she frowned.

“Mikael, she survived . Against all odds, and that is remarkable. It would be wise to not forget that so quickly.” His mother studied him for a long moment before she stood. “Go be with her. You both need each other more than anything else right now. We’ll figure out the rest.”

Mikael should have thanked his mother for her help, but he didn’t even have it in him to say goodbye to her when she kissed his cheek and made her way to the door.

It took everything just to haul himself off the sofa and have his uneasy legs carry him over to Cyril’s bed. She didn’t stir at all when he eased in beside her.

He swept her hair back from her face, tucking it behind the delicate point of her ear. Sleep schooled her usually striking features into something deceptively serene, like she hadn’t just spent the night fighting for her life.

Her nose wrinkled at his touch, a quiet noise leaving her, and Mikael loosed a shaky breath.

She survived. She survived. She survived.