036 - Where?

036 - Where?


I stayed because leaving early meant something, and I refused to give this court anything else to read into tonight, not when they'd all already clearly noticed Zeirik's absence.

What is he doing?!

So I smiled and I nodded and I held my wine glass and I watched Cassien's wedding reception carry on around me with the patience of someone who had learned a long time ago that endurance was its own kind of weapon.

Hana moved through the room on Cassien's arm, radiant and flushed and receiving congratulations with that soft grateful smile that made people want to give her more of them. Women I'd spent four years carefully cultivating reached for her hands and kissed her cheeks and I watched it happen and felt the sting of watching everything I'd built get handed to someone else, still warm.

Cassien caught my eye once across the room.

Just once. A look that lasted no more than two seconds and burned considerably longer — raw and unfinished, the look of a man who had made his choice and was standing inside the consequences of it. I'd braced for it to cut me open. Instead it landed dull and bruise-deep, my chest already too numb to bleed from it.

I looked away first.

I had to.

When the crowd thinned enough that leaving stopped being a statement, I slipped out with a group of departing guests and let the cold air of the corridor hit my face. My cheeks ached from holding the right expression for hours. My feet hurt.

I walked back to the general's wing alone and told myself he'd be there. Sprawled on the sofa with his reports, or standing at the window with his arms crossed, turning to look at me with that smile I somehow had foolishly convinced myself was reserved for just me.

He wasn't.

The sitting room was exactly as we'd left it before the wedding. His reports stacked on the side table. The sofa cushions still dented from where he'd been lying. Everything in its place and all of it wrong because he wasn't in it.

I checked the bedroom. The dressing room. Stood in the middle of the sitting room and listened to the silence press back at me.

I was still standing there when I heard footsteps in the corridor and stepped out to find Mira, her arms full of fresh linens, heading toward the bedroom.

She saw my face and stopped walking.

"Do you know where he is?" I asked. "Him and Marcus — they both disappeared from the reception and I've checked everywhere—"

"Don't worry." Her voice was easy, her smile easy, but her eyes had done something I'd never seen them do before. Gone careful. Closed off just slightly at the edges, like a door pushed to without being fully shut. "Just retire for the night. I'll resume the search."

"I'm too worried to sleep." I watched her face. "This is so unlike him, Mira. He wouldn't just disappear without—"

"He's fine." She said it with the confidence of someone who knew more than she was sharing and had decided, firmly, not to share it. "You know how he and Marcus get. Probably found somewhere quiet to be loud in." She smiled, and this time it reached her eyes, warm and deliberate. "I'll make sure he gets back in one piece."

She said it lightly. A joke, clearly meant as one.

It didn't land that way. My stomach pulled tight around it and stayed there.

Mira held my gaze for a moment longer than she needed to, then nodded once and continued down the corridor like the conversation was finished.

I went into the bedroom and closed the door and stood with my back against it in the quiet.

The bath was drawn hot, steam rising in slow curls, and I sank into it and let the heat work at the tension locked across my shoulders, the ache behind my eyes, the long sustained effort of an entire evening spent holding myself together in front of people who wanted to watch me fall apart. The water went from scalding to warm and I stayed in it anyway.

My mind, irritatingly, would not settle on Cassien. Not on his look across the room or Victoria's quiet threats or the sight of Hana's hand in his. Every time I reached for those thoughts they slid sideways and landed somewhere else entirely.

On an empty sofa. On reports stacked on a side table. On the cold that came into a room before he did, announcing him, and how I'd started listening for it without meaning to.

Where was he?

I changed into my nightgown and climbed into bed and lay in the dark with my worry sitting in my chest like a living thing, breathing alongside me. The palace was quiet around me. The wing was quieter.

He'd be back by morning. Mira would find him, whatever he and Marcus had gotten themselves into, and he'd come back and sprawl across that sofa and make some crude joke about where he'd been and I'd roll my eyes and feel the knot in my chest loosen.

That was what would happen.

I closed my eyes and held onto that and let sleep pull me under.