The first thing she was aware of was light.

  Not the grey flat light of heavy cloud cover — real light, pale and thin but genuine, the kind that came from an actual sun making an actual effort somewhere beyond the window. She looked at it for a long time without moving, without thinking, just receiving it the way you received things when your body had decided that warmth and light were the only items on the agenda.

  She was alive.

  She took a breath and her ribs informed her immediately that they were aware of that fact and had opinions about it. She noted this and breathed shallowly and took the rest of the inventory slowly.

  Head — the deep pulsing pressure still there but quieter, sitting further back. Wrists — she looked at them. At the clean white dressings wrapped from palm to mid forearm. She looked at them for a moment and then looked away and put that aside for now. Ribs — present and vocal. The cold — gone. Actually gone, her body temperature restored to something that felt like herself again.

  She turned her head.

  Kaelan was in the chair.

  Not asleep — she understood immediately that he was not asleep, that he had not been asleep, that the quality of stillness he had was the quality of someone who had been awake for a long time and had made peace with that. He was sitting with his elbows on his knees and his hands loosely clasped and his eyes on her and when she turned her head and found him there he didn't startle, didn't shift, just — met her eyes, the way he always did, with the complete and unhurried attention of someone who had been waiting and was not in any particular distress about the waiting.

  She looked at him.

  He looked at her.

  "How long," she said. Her voice came out rough and small.

  "Two days."

  She absorbed this. Two days. She looked at the ceiling and thought about two days and couldn't quite fit the shape of it into anything that felt real.

  "You've been here," she said.

  Not a question. She could tell by the chair — the particular angle it was set at, the way it had become simply *his chair* in this room the way things became yours when you occupied them long enough.

  He didn't answer that directly. He reached forward instead and poured water from the small pitcher on the table beside her into a cup and held it out to her.

  She pushed herself up carefully — ribs — and took it with both hands, the dressings on her wrists making her grip slightly awkward, and she drank slowly and he waited without filling the silence with anything and she was grateful for that the way she was always grateful for that about him.

  She lowered the cup.

  He was still looking at her.

  There was something different about how he was looking at her — she couldn't name it precisely, couldn't locate it in any single feature because his face was doing what his face always did, which was give very little away. But it was there. Something underneath the steadiness that was — softer than usual. Not soft, Kaelan was not soft, but *softer,* a degree of something that she hadn't seen directed at her before in quite this way, and it made her want to look away which she didn't.

  "Your wrists will take time," he said. "Don't use them more than necessary."

  She looked down at the dressings. "How bad."

  "Bad enough." A pause, and then — quieter than his usual delivery, something more careful in it: "You won't have permanent damage. Davan made sure of that."

  She nodded. She kept looking at her wrists.

  "The ribs," he continued. "Three cracked. You need to tell Davan immediately if the pain changes — sharper, deeper, different from what it is now."

  "Okay."

  "Head injury is a concussion. Second one since you arrived here." He paused. "You need to rest. Properly. Not the way you rested before —" Something moved through his expression. Brief. "Not the way you did before, where you were awake before dawn every morning running circuits alone."

  The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

  She looked up. "You knew about that?"

  He looked at her steadily. Said nothing.

  Which was an answer.

  She felt heat come into her face — a small embarrassment, the kind that arrived when you discovered that something you'd believed was private had not been entirely private — and she looked back down at her hands.

  "I wasn't —" She started.

  "I know what you were doing," he said. And his voice on that was not a reprimand. It was something else — something that acknowledged what she had been doing and what it had cost her and what it meant that she had done it anyway, all at once, without requiring her to explain any of it.

  She was quiet for a moment.

  Then, because it was sitting in her chest and she couldn't organize anything around it until it was out: "Why did you come."

  He looked at her.

  "You were missing," he said.

  "There are hunters who go missing." She kept her voice even. "I'm not a hunter. I'm not —" She stopped. "I'm not part of this. Not really. You didn't have to —"

  "Elia."

  She stopped.

  He leaned forward slightly in the chair — just slightly, closing the distance by a fraction — and he looked at her with that thing in his expression that she couldn't name, the softer thing, and he said:

  "You are part of this."

  Simply. The way he said things that were simply true.

  She looked at him and felt her throat tighten in a way that she was not going to allow to become anything further and she pressed her lips together and breathed carefully through her nose and looked at the window until the tightening receded to something manageable.

  She looked back at him.

  "I was upside down," she said. Her voice came out smaller than she'd intended. "When you found me."

  "Yes."

  "For a long time."

  "Yes."

  She looked at her wrists. She thought about the cord tightening and the cold and the dark coming in from the edges of her vision and the way his name had arrived in her mind when everything else had run out. She was not going to tell him that last part. She was never going to tell him that last part.

  She looked up.

  "What was I — " He stopped. Started again, and she noticed that he chose his words carefully, the way he always did, but more carefully than usual, like he was aware of the edges of what she would and wouldn't want to revisit. "When I reached you. You were saying something."

  The heat came back into her face immediately and completely.

  "I don't — " She stopped. Looked at her hands. Looked at the window. Looked at anywhere that was not him. "I was — it was the cold. And the head injury. I wasn't —"

  "What were you saying," he said. Quiet. Genuinely asking.

  She was silent for a moment.

  "I was telling the demon," she said, very quietly, her voice coming out so small she could barely hear it herself, "not to eat me." A pause. "I told it I didn't taste good." Another pause. "It didn't listen."

  The room was very quiet.

  She could feel him looking at her and she could not look back at him right now, she was looking at her hands in her lap and feeling the heat in her face and thinking about the fact that she had been suspended upside down above a demon making jokes about her own nutritional value and he had heard some of that and she was never going to recover from this, probably.

  "It didn't listen," he repeated.

  "No." Very small. "Very rude. I thought the advice was quite practical."

  Another silence.

  And then — she almost missed it, it was so brief, so unlike him — something happened to his expression. Not a smile, not quite, Kaelan did not smile the way ordinary people smiled, but something adjacent to it, something that moved through the corners of his eyes and the line of his mouth and was gone before it fully arrived, leaving only the steadiness behind.

  But she saw it.

  She looked at him and she saw it and she felt something happen in her chest that she was absolutely not going to examine.

  She looked back at her hands.

  "You should sleep," he said. His voice had something in it that was — different. Still quiet, still even, but with a warmth in it that she was fairly certain had not been in his voice before, or not directed at her, not quite like this.

  "I've been sleeping for two days," she said.

  "And your body used all of it." He stood — slowly, without urgency — and he reached over and adjusted the blanket at her side, tucking it closer with a care that was so matter of fact, so unhurried, that she almost didn't register what it was until he had already done it and straightened.

  She registered it.

  She looked at the blanket. At his hands. At him.

  He looked back at her and the soft thing was still there, quieter now but present, and he said: "Sleep. I'll be here."

  She looked at him for a long moment.

  She wanted to ask what that meant — *I'll be here,* what that meant from him specifically, from a man who chose every word with the precision of someone who did not spend them carelessly. She wanted to ask and she didn't ask because she was nineteen years old and she had been upside down above a demon two days ago and she didn't have the capacity right now for whatever the answer might be.

  She lay back down.

  Carefully, around the ribs, around the wrists, around everything that was making itself known.

  She looked at the ceiling.

  "Kaelan," she said.

  "Mm."

  "Thank you." Very quiet. "For coming."

  He was silent for a moment.

  "Go to sleep Elia," he said.

  She closed her eyes.

  She could hear him settle back into the chair — the small sound of it, the particular quality of his stillness filling the room the way it always did, like something solid that the air organized itself around.

  She thought about *I'll be here* and what it meant and decided she would think about it tomorrow when her head hurt less and her ribs hurt less and she was better equipped to look at things clearly.

  She thought about the almost-smile.

  She fell asleep.