Chapter 112 Someone Before

Chapter 112 Someone Before
Lyanna

“Mireya was my fiancée.”

For several seconds, I only looked at him.

Of all the answers I had imagined while he and Asha stood outside, that had not been one of them.

“Your fiancée?”

Elias nodded.

The fire shifted behind him, sending a brief flare of light across his face.

“We were betrothed for several years.”

I lowered the cup in my hands.

“You were going to marry.”

“Yes.”

Something strange moved through me before I could identify it, but it was not anger. I had no right to anger, and there was nothing in his expression that invited it anyway.

There was grief there, old enough that he had learned how to carry it, but I recognized it all the same.

I looked toward the door through which Asha had disappeared.

“She said you did this with her too.”

“She did.”

“What did she mean?”

Elias leaned back slightly in the chair.

“Mireya died.”

Whatever had moved through me vanished beneath something much simpler.

“Oh.”

His gaze dropped.

“I’m sorry.”

“Thank you.”

“How long ago?”

“Six years.”

Six years meant she had died long before the war ended, before the occupation and before I had ever known there was an Elias Veras somewhere in Drakovia.

I studied his lowered face.

“What happened to her?”

He was quiet long enough that I wondered whether I should withdraw the question.

Then he said, “She was pregnant.”

My fingers tightened around the cup.

Elias noticed.

“She developed complications while I was away with my regiment. By the time word reached me, she was already dead.”

“And the baby?”

His eyes met mine.

“The child died too.”

I swallowed.

“I’m sorry,” I said again, because there was nothing else to give him.

Elias nodded.

The room had become too warm beneath the blanket Asha had put over my legs. I pushed it down slightly.

Then something occurred to me.

I looked at him again.

“How far along was she?”

His expression changed.

“Lyanna.”

“You don’t have to tell me.”

“No, it isn't that.”

He rubbed his thumb along the edge of his palm.

“She was farther along than you are now when she died.”

I understood then why Asha had looked at him the way she had during my examination. It explained why Elias knew questions most soldiers had no reason to know and why the word cramping had turned his head so quickly.

Then Elias spoke again.

“The child wasn't mine.”

I stared at him.

“What?”

He did not look away.

“I had been gone nearly six months when Mireya told me she was pregnant.”

The meaning took a moment to settle.

“You knew?”

“Yes.”

“And you were still going to marry her?”

“Yes.”

I must have looked as confused as I felt because Elias shifted forward.

“Ending the betrothal would have required an explanation. Her family would have demanded one, and eventually someone would have counted.”

His mouth tightened.

“She was frightened of what would happen if they knew.”

“So you were going to claim the child.”

“Yes.”

The word came softly, almost as though what he had intended required no explanation at all.

I looked down at my stomach as the baby moved beneath the place where my hand rested.

There had been another pregnant woman before me, carrying another man's child and frightened of what would happen if the wrong people decided her pregnancy made her something they were entitled to punish.

Elias had chosen to protect her too.

I suddenly wished Asha had given me something stronger than herbs.

“You loved her,” I said.

It was not quite a question.

“Yes.”

There was no hesitation.

I made myself nod.

Mireya was dead.

Whatever foolish little creature had stirred beneath my ribs at the word fiancée had no business baring its teeth at a woman who had been dead for six years.

Besides, that was not what bothered me.

I looked toward the shelves instead.

Asha had known her.

Asha had known Elias then too.

She knew which foods he hated and which scars hurt in winter. She knew his sister and his father. She could speak of his mother without first needing to ask her name.

Mireya had known another version of him entirely.

I had met Elias in a punishment square.

For months, I had thought there was something particular about the way he cared for me. The questions he asked, the food that appeared beside me before I admitted I was hungry, his attention whenever my breathing changed and the infuriating way he noticed when I was hiding pain had all become so familiar that I had stopped wondering when they began.

The possibility that I had misunderstood where some of that care came from left an unpleasant tightness in my stomach.

“Lyanna?”

I looked up.

Elias was watching me.

“What?”

“You've gone quiet.”

“I’m tired.”

His expression remained unchanged.

It was an entirely reasonable excuse. Unfortunately, I had spent too long with him for reasonable excuses to work as well as they once had.

“What is it?”

“Nothing.”

The word left automatically.

I almost let it stand.

Then I remembered how many times nothing had become something much larger between us.

I looked into my cup.

Elias waited.

That was somehow worse.

I could have asked anything else.

Instead, I lifted my eyes.

“Did you take care of me because I reminded you of her?”

Elias stared at me.

For one terrible moment, I wanted to climb directly into Asha’s hearth.

“What?”

I should have stopped.

I did not.

“When you found out I was pregnant, you already knew what had happened to Mireya. Then there was me, carrying another man's child, and I thought perhaps—”

“No.”

The answer came so quickly that I stopped.

Elias had gone completely still.

“No.”

I looked down.

“All right.”

“Lyanna.”

“I said all right.”

“That was not an all right that meant all right.”

I glared at him.

He ignored it.

“Mireya is part of why pregnancy frightens me.”

I looked back at him.

He continued before I could speak.

“I learned things afterward that I wish I'd known before. I pay attention to symptoms because I know how quickly they can matter. When you tell me something hurts and refuse to explain how much, some of that fear comes from what happened to her.”

My embarrassment worsened.

“So I wasn't entirely wrong.”

“About that? No.”

His eyes held mine.

“About everything else, yes.”

I swallowed.

“How?”

Elias frowned.

“What?”

“What is different?”

I regretted the question immediately.

It sounded awful once spoken aloud.

Mireya had been a real person, someone he had loved. She did not deserve to become a measure against which I placed myself.

“I shouldn't have asked that.”

“Mireya was Mireya.”

I looked at him.

His voice had softened.

“I knew her for years. We had our own history, and I cared for her because she was herself.”

His gaze stayed on mine.

“You are Lyanna.”

Something shifted beneath my ribs.

“What happened between us did not happen because you were pregnant when I met you. It didn't happen because your child belonged to someone else, and it certainly didn't happen because you reminded me of a woman you never met.”

I said nothing.

“I know the difference.”

There was nothing dramatic in the way he said it, which was why I believed him.

I looked down at the herbs floating in my cup.

“I see.”

Elias continued watching me.

I could feel it.

My ears had begun getting warm.

There were very few dignified ways to recover from asking a man whether his dead fiancée was the reason he cared about you.

I found none of them.

“You can stop looking at me now.”

“I wasn't aware I was prohibited.”

“You are.”

He remained silent.

I glanced up and found something beginning to change in his expression.

It was slight, but I knew him well enough now to recognize the moment a thought occurred to him.

Unfortunately, I had a fairly good idea what that thought was.

My face warmed.

“Don't.”

His eyebrows rose.

I lifted my hand before he could speak.

Whatever you are thinking, keep it to yourself.

For a moment, he simply watched me.

Then his mouth twitched.

I looked away.

“I wasn't jealous.”

The silence that followed was considerably worse than anything he could have said.

I closed my eyes.

That had been a mistake.

A quiet laugh escaped him.

“Elias.”

“I'm sorry.”

He sounded as though he was trying to be.

That might have been convincing if I couldn't see his face.

I shook my head and looked down at my cup, but the absurdity of my own denial caught up with me before I could recover. A laugh slipped out.

Elias's smile widened.

I tried to suppress the next one and failed.

For a little while, neither of us said anything more about Mireya or Asha or the embarrassing things Elias had apparently learned to read from my face.

We simply sat beside the fire and laughed.