The contact startled her with its immediacy.
His skin burned beneath her palms—fever-warm and damp with sweat. She felt the uneven texture of the scars, the altered pull of damaged tissue. His fingers remained clenched, rigid with tension, and for an instant she thought he might wrench free.
Then, slowly, his grip slackened.
“Benjamin,” she said again, softer now. “I am here. You are safe.”
His breathing faltered, then began to steady. The rigid lines of his body eased by degrees as wakefulness displaced the nightmare. She watched his face—watched anguish yield to confusion, confusion to recognition, recognition to something perilously like shame.
His eyes opened.
For several moments, he simply looked at her—at her face, at her hands enclosing his, at the impossible reality of her presence in his chamber at such an hour.
“Eleanor?” His voice was rough, scraped raw. “What—”
“You were dreaming.” She did not release his hand. Did not move from the bed’s edge. “I heard you.”
He closed his eyes briefly, and she saw him attempt to gather himself—to reconstruct the composure that had deserted him in sleep.
“Forgive me,” he said quietly. “I did not mean to wake you. It happens sometimes. The dreams. I thought—” He stopped, swallowed. “I thought I had learnt to be quieter.”
Quieter.The word struck her with unexpected force.
Not to cease the nightmares. Merely to endure them in silence.
How many nights had he woken like this? How many years had he spent gasping in the darkness, reliving horrors that would never fully release him, with no one to hold his hand and tell him he was safe?
“You need not be quiet,” Eleanor said. Her voice came out stronger than she intended. “You need not endure such things alone merely to spare others discomfort.”
He regarded her, surprise flickering across his expression.
“You should return to your chambers,” he said after a moment. “I am quite well. It was only a dream.”
“You are not well,” she replied calmly, tightening her hold upon his hand as he instinctively sought retreat. “And I am not leaving.”
She did not know where the certainty came from.
She knew only that the notion of abandoning him—of returning to her own bed and feigning ignorance of his suffering—was intolerable.
Whatever boundaries they had maintained, whatever careful distances they had preserved, they could not apply here. Not while he looked at her with eyes that held equal measures of gratitude and alarm.
“Eleanor—”
“Tell me about it,” she said gently. “The dream. Tell me what you see.”
He lay silent for a long while. She watched him wrestle with some internal conflict—habit against need, solitude against trust.
“Fire,” he said at last. “It is always fire.”
“The farmhouse. In Spain.”
“Yes.” His hand shifted within hers—not withdrawing, but adjusting, his fingers slowly uncurling until they laced through her own. “I see the flames spreading. I hear the men shouting. I try to reach the building, but the fire is too swift. Too fierce. And inside—”
His voice broke.
“Inside, I hear them. The families. Calling out.”
Eleanor swallowed. “You tried to save them.”
