You are for the Veil. You are for the blade. You are not for this.
A memory she had not asked for rose clean: his hands grasping and his mouth pulling, lavishing—
She stopped with her palm flat to a garden wall, breath loud in her head. The sickness curdled into grief, and she refused that, too.
If Grim could see you. If Baron—
She shut her teeth on his name. The taste of it hurt.
A cart approached behind her. “You’ll want to step off the lane,” the driver said without malice. She obeyed, found the ditch edge, waited for it to pass. The man lifted two fingers in thanks. She watched the wheel go by and thought, wildly, of time. How it moved whether she wanted it or not. How last night already belonged to it.
Her hands shook and she tucked them into her sleeves and kept walking until the town thinned. Past the last thatch, the road shouldered up into low fields and a hedgerow tatty with last year’s nests. Fog clung to the grass in scraps. She stood there, on the edge of leaving, and tried to measure it: how far she could go before he woke. How far she would have to go before she did not turn back.
The answer was not far at all.
“That bad?” His voice low, even, and too certain slipped through the mist.
Her gut twisted. She turned, and of course he was there, his dark eyes fixed on her. They weren’t hard or cold as shemight have preferred, but thoughtful, warm, almost amused—as though her storm were just another weather he had expected all along. She hated the way her pulse jumped under his regard, how her body leaned toward him even as her mind snarled to pull away.
Ilys groaned, head tipping back.
He spared her the trouble of answering, only nodded toward the inn. “Breakfast?”
She huffed, brushed past him, and walked ahead, willing herself not to feel the gravity of his presence at her back.
The inn smelled of smoke and onions, of wool steaming near the hearth. The benches were already crowded with traders and farmers, but the innkeeper’s wife found them space at a corner table. She set down two bowls with a dull thud: watery broth, cabbage gone limp, and a wedge of bread that fell apart the moment Ilys touched it.
Her appetite died on sight.
Death looked from her plate to her face, one brow lifting. “Do you have anything else?” he asked the innkeeper’s wife. His tone polite but firm
The woman frowned. “This is breakfast.”
“She does not care for—”
“Do not finish that sentence.” Ilys’s voice cut sharper than she meant, but the heat in her chest only swelled when he glanced back at her, unruffled.
“You do not like that,” he said simply.
Her spoon clattered against the bowl. “And how would you know?”
His gaze held hers, exasperating in its dogged nature. “Because you told me.”
“That was a conversation,” she snapped, voice rising despite the nearby ears. “Not an invitation to memorize my every whim like a nursemaid.”
The bench scraped as she leaned forward, glaring. Her stomach knotted, not from the broth, but from the quiet certainty in his eyes.
“I did it without thinking,” he said at last. His tone lost its edge, almost conciliatory. “I’m sorry. Dine away.” He made a small, dismissive wave toward her bowl, as though that settled it.
They ate in brittle silence, each scrape of her spoon against the bowl loud as a strike. Her anger festered with every bite, swelling like a wound she could not bind.
“How is your shoulder?” he asked finally, pleasantly, as though the night before had given him the right.
Her spoon clattered against the table, resolve snapping. “We are not lovers!” she shouted, too loud, too raw
Conversations faltered. A few heads turned.
Ilys’s chest heaved, every breath ragged with the effort of holding herself together.
