The arm across my middle shifts. The weight lifts slightly and then resettles, a sleeper adjusting, and the motion brings the smell closer. Pine and leather and warm skin.
"She's waking."
The voice comes in a whisper from across the room. Quiet. Owen.
The arm lifts away from me. The warmth goes with it, the sudden absence of contact along my entire back, and I make a sound I didn't plan to make. Something between a protest and a whimper that comes from the animal part of my body, the part that doesn't know about context or caution, the part that only knows it had something and lost it before it was ready.
A hand on my shoulder. Careful. Fingers spreading wide enough to hold me as he turns me onto my back, the pressure firm enough to guide and slow enough that my body can follow without bracing.
Jace is looking down at me.
Close enough that the firelight catches the line of his jaw, the auburn in the stubble at his chin. His eyes are direct, pale blue and assessing, but the thing behind them is not the expression I've seen on Jace's face before. No edge. No amusement. No provocation waiting in the corner of his mouth. Something careful sits there instead. Watchful.
"Hey," he says. "You're okay."
I look at him. Then past him, at the room. My brain assembles the picture in visual pieces: stone fireplace, floor to ceiling, the fire going strong and orange and real. Dark wood beams above. The dim suggestion of an antler chandelier, unlit, its shadow thrown huge and branching across the ceiling.
Owen in an armchair to my left, forearms on his knees, watching me with a close attention that registers against every surface of my skin.
Reid on the sofa beyond him, already coming upright, already moving, the transition from rest to fully operational happening in a single motion.
I'm on the floor. In front of the fireplace. In a sleeping bag.
With Jace.
"What..." I say. It's the only word I have.
Reid drops to his knees beside me. His hands come to my face before I've finished processing, two fingers under my jaw finding the pulse point with the precision of someone who has done this hundreds of times and never once needed to fumble for it. Then a small flashlight from his back pocket, the beam into my right eye, then my left. The light sends the throbbing above my brow into something sharper and I wince.
"Follow the light," he says.
I follow it. His face is close enough that I can see the specific blue of his eyes shifting toward grey in the low gold of the firelight. The focus in them is total.
"What's today's date?"
"March." I have to think. The gap between where I am and where I was is complete, a wall of nothing. "Seventh? Eighth? One of those."
"What's your full name?"
"Maya Sophia Reeves." The questions are orienting me.
"Do you know where you are?"
"No." Then, looking around at the stone and the wood and the fireplace and the three large men arranged around me like points on a compass: "Your home?"
He nods. His hand moves to my forehead, careful, fingers reading the area above my left eye. I feel the tenderness of the wound, the skin hot and swollen, and I pull back slightly.
"Easy." His voice doesn't change. "Superficial cut. You're going to have a headache for a day or two." He sits back on his heels, the assessment still running behind his eyes even as his hands leave my skin. "Do you remember what happened?"
I try. There's the woodpile. The cold. The logs shifting under my feet. And then nothing.
"The woodpile," I say. "The stack collapsed." I can feel the shape of it, the understanding that something fell on me, but the actual memory stops at the sensation of falling and starts again here, in this sleeping bag, on this floor. "And then I was here."
"We found you behind the cabin," Owen says from the armchair. "We noticed the smoke was missing from your chimney. We went to check."
I look at him when he says this.
They noticed. Which means they were looking.
