His hair is disheveled, falling across his forehead instead of its usual careless perfection. His clothes are different from what he was wearing at the lake, scrubs and a blanket draped over his shoulders, and there are shadows under his eyes like he hasn’t slept. When he sees me sitting up, his entire body goes rigid in the doorway.
“You’re awake.” His voice comes out rough. Raw. Like it’s been scraped over gravel.
“The boy,” I say immediately. “Is he—”
“He’s fine.” Veil crosses the room in three strides. “Thanks to you.”
The relief pulls me back against the pillows.
He’s okay.
He’s fine.
It wasn’t for nothing.
I press my hands against my face and breathe, and for a moment I’m back in the water, kicking upward with the boy’s coat fisted in my numb fingers, my lungs burning, the surface impossibly far above me. But he’s alive. A ten-year-old boy with a green scarf is alive, and that’s the only thing that matters.
When I lower my hands, Veil is standing beside the bed staring at me with an intensity that makes the beeping monitor speed up. He’s looking at me like he’s seeing me for the first time, or like he’s afraid I’ll disappear if he blinks, and I’ve never seen him without his mask before. Not once. Not in all the days I’ve known him. Even at the calligraphy workshop, even in the study, there was always something held back. Some layer of control, of calculation, of the duke assessing and measuring and deciding how much to reveal.
That’s gone now.
Whatever is on his face right now is completely unguarded, and I don’t know what to do with it.
“How long was I out?” My voice cracks.
“Six hours.” He pulls a chair closer to the bed and sits down heavily, like his legs have stopped cooperating. “You had moderate hypothermia. Dr. Faulke said you were lucky. Another minute in that water and—”
He stops.
Clears his throat.
Looks away.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper. “I didn’t think. I just saw him in the water and I—”
“You saved his life.” His eyes snap back to mine. “You jumped into freezing water without hesitation for a child you’d never met.” A pause. “You nearly died, Evianne.”
It’s the first time he’s said my name without the “Miss” in front of it.
Just Evianne. Stripped bare. Like the formality burned off somewhere between the ice and this room.
The realization settles into my chest, warm and heavy, and I don’t know what to do with that.
“I’m sorry,” I say again, because I don’t know what else to say, because he’s leaning forward now with his elbows on his knees and looking at me with such intensity that I forget how to breathe, and this is the man I spent five days avoiding, five days running from, five days pretending I didn’t feel exactly what I feel, and he’s sitting here beside my hospital bed in scrubs with shadows under his eyes because he’s been here the whole time, hasn’t he?
Six hours.
He sat here for six hours.
“Did you—” I start. “Were you here the whole—”
“Yes.”
No hesitation. No deflection. No mask.
Just yes.
And I don’t know what to do with that either.
