I said nothing, hoping he would leave me alone. But he asked anyway.
“When I took you, Cerilla said the wounds on your arms were older,” he stated simply. “Self-inflicted,perhaps.”
My jaw tightened. I wasn’t going to tell him I’d done them to myself, that I was so ashamed of what I was that I had tried to bleed it from myself to save Riven. “You’re asking questions you haven’t earnt.” I threw his words back at him. Gods, I hoped Cerilla hadn’t seen the scars on my back.
He chuckled, not the mocking sound I was used to, but a genuine laugh. Its rich timbre tones made my toes curl and made me shift uncomfortably.
“Do you have a question?” he asked after a moment.
The silence stretched between us. It was thick and uneasy, but not hostile. For once, he didn’t look like the Commander of Death. He just looked… haunted. I could ask so many questions. But I was beyond exhausted, and I couldn’t handle the weight of answers right now.
“Do you ever sleep?” I asked quietly.
Another chuckle. Gods damn it, why did I like that sound?
“That’s what you’re asking me?”
I glared at him through the dim orange light, and his grin told me he could see it.
“Not when I can help it,” he answered. I wasn’t expecting him to answer, or to overly care about his response. But I sat up and brought my knees to my chest.
“Nightmares?” I wondered, almost curiously.
“Memories,” he corrected. His eyes flicked to the mouth of the cave, where rain still dripped from the stone. “Sometimes the two are the same.”
I hesitated before speaking again, my voice barely a whisper against the rainfall. “I get nightmares too.”
His eyes found mine once more. “I know.”
The words hung there, cold and sharp, until he added, “I can tell. You exist like a shadow of yourself.” He said the words so gentle that gooseflesh pebbled on my skin. “You hesitate before speaking, then flinch for speaking your mind. You move like someone waiting to be struck, and you keep throwing yourself at death as if you’re begging it to take you. Yesterday, when I pulled you back, you didn’twantsaving. You wanted to die. Whatever made you that way, I’m not surprised you have nightmares.”
I should have looked away. I didn’t. His words settled under my skin, heavy and invasive, like fingers pressing against an old bruise to see how much it still hurt.
No one had ever said those things out loud before. They had seen the obedience. The silence. The broken girl who learned when not to speak. But he had named the rest of it— the waiting, the flinching, the wanting it to end. And that terrified me more than his threats ever had. There was something behind his voice that made me stare at him in anew light. It wasn’t a threat, not mockery, not sarcasm. It sounded like empathy spoken by someone who had struggled and saw the same demons staring back at him.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” I snapped, though the bite in my voice dulled as soon as it left me. His gaze didn’t harden. It didn’t soften either. It simplywaited.
I tore my eyes away first, fixing them on the dying embers. On anything that wasn’t the quiet understanding in his expression.
“You don’t get to look at me like that,” I said, lower now. “You know nothing about me.”
Because if he did… If anyone ever truly did, then I wouldn’t be able to pretend I was okay. And I had built my entire existence on pretending.
He stared at me for a long moment, contemplating. As though he were going to say something else, but instead, he leaned back against the rock, settling in. “Go to sleep, Drownling,” he murmured, though it didn’t sound like an order this time. “I’ll keep you safe from the monsters.”
I laid back down and turned away from him, but a faint smile ghosted my lips. The storm roared outside, but inside the cave, something between us changed. I still hated him. Still wanted to sink my axe into his neck and watch the blood spray like rain. Because hatred was easier than admitting that, for one unguarded moment, he was the one person in this world who had truly seen me.
Twenty-Four
Nightmares
The sea was on fire. Smoke bled into the sky, and blood-stained waves clawed at a crumbling cliff. A woman stood at its edge, wearing black battle armour with her silver hair braided beneath a crown of shells that shimmered like moonlight on glass. Her eyes were the most vibrant blue I had ever seen, brighter than mine. Unnatural.
“Hello, my love,” she whispered, tears swimming in her eyes.
“No. I am your death.”
A blade struck through her chest, a black flash of steel. It was so fast I didn’t see who wielded it, only the spray of blood and the woman fall to the ground.
