I nodded. “So am I.”
His hand remained over my stomach while the morning light widened slowly at the windows. The chamber looked different now than it had in the night, less like a place of illness and more like a place where a future had just been spoken into being.
“We are not safe here,” I said at last.
The happiness did not leave his face, but it changed. Became something harder. More alert.
“Tell me everything,” he said.
And because he was awake, because he was here, because we had already lost too much time to silence and distance, I did.
CHAPTER 32
Revelations
Itold him everything.
It took most of the morning. He did not interrupt. By the time I finished, the light had shifted and the room felt different, smaller somehow, the way rooms do when the things that have lived inside you for months finally find somewhere else to be.
When I stopped speaking he pulled me closer and held me there, his hand at the back of my head, and said nothing at all. It was enough.
The chamber is quiet again by the time I rise from beside him. The fire has burned low and the room smells faintly of smoke and clean linen.
"I want to lie beside you," I tell him softly.
"Yes."
The answer comes immediately, without hesitation.
I reach for the ties of my gown. The silk loosens beneath my fingers and slides from my shoulders until the fabric gathers loosely at my arms.
And then I stop.
The dress hangs half fallen while I stand beside the bed, my hands caught in the silk.
"Asharin."
His voice is gentle but attentive. "What is it?"
I shake my head. "Nothing." But the word sounds wrong even to me. When I still do not move he shifts higher against the pillows despite the bandages drawn tight across his ribs.
"You stopped," he says quietly.
I lift the gown slightly and show him the gold marks on my thigh. "There was no healer on the ship," I say. "That is what they did to clear the infection." A pause. "I stopped counting at nine when Mysin and his men stabbed me repeatedly.”
Something in my chest breaks loose. And for the first time since all of it, I start crying. Really crying. "I kept waiting for you," I say. "Every day. I kept telling myself you would come." My hand moves to my stomach. "I was so afraid I would have to do this alone. That you would not make it. That our children would grow up never knowing you."
His expression breaks open.
"He is a siakar," I say quietly. "Your son. He will need you to teach him."
For a long moment he does not speak. Something moves through his face that has no name, something that breaks openslowly and does not close again. His eyes drop to my stomach and stay there.
When he finally looks back up at me there is nothing controlled in his face at all.
He draws me closer until I stand within the circle of his arms. "I crossed the world because I had to believe you were still alive somewhere ahead of me," he says, his voice rough. "I did not know if you survived. I did not know if the child we made endured the journey."
The silk slides from my arms. Colsar finishes removing the gown himself, drawing the fabric gently downward until it falls to the floor. His thumb brushes lightly over the gold marks on my thigh, taking them in the same way he takes in everything else about me. His expression holds no pity. Only care.
