The answer drops between us. I watch her receive it. Not flinch from it. Just take it in and set it alongside everything else she knows.
“Is it happening to you?”
“I don't know.” The honest answer. The one that costs. “The rage is always there. It gets harder to hold back. When I dream, sometimes I lose it. Wake up and don't know where I've been. What I've done.”
She's quiet for a moment. “That's why you don't sleep near people.”
“That's why.”
“But you slept near me. At the farmhouse.”
“You offered to keep watch.” I'm looking at my hands. The knuckles, the scars, the places where the skin is thicker than it should be from years of damage and repair. “No one has ever offered that before.”
“And it worked. I talked. You slept. The rage stayed down.”
“This time.”
“This time is all we have.” She says it simply. A fact, not a comfort. “Tell me about the creature. Why do you think it’s your fault?”
The question finds the wound and presses. I should give her the full answer, should crack myself open the way she cracked my ribs open in the ditch, clinical and thorough and unafraid.
But I'm not ready. Everything I could tell her is pressing against the back of my teeth, and it would come out broken and ugly and true, and she would not flinch. I know that about her now. But some wounds you can't show someone until you trust yourself not to bleed out in the showing.
“I left him behind,” I say. “And the rage took him.”
“And you've been trying to find him since.”
“Trying to end it. What he's become... it's not living. It's a prison. The rage keeps him moving, keeps him hunting, but the man he was is gone. Or buried so deep I can't reach him.” I look at my hands again. “Eight years of trying.”
“Why alone?”
“Because I'm the one who left him.”
She doesn't argue with that. Doesn't tell me it wasn't my fault, doesn't try to rearrange the guilt into something more comfortable. She just looks at me with that expression I'm starting to recognize. Not pity. Not judgement. The wound-assessment look. Deciding what can be mended and what has to be cut away.
“It's close,” I say. “It followed us here. I can feel it.”
“How close?”
“Close enough.” I look toward the window. The square is dark. The village has gone quiet, doors shut, windows shuttered. They can feel it too, even if they don't know what it is. That animal instinct that says something is wrong. “Tomorrow. The next night. Soon.”
She absorbs this. Then she stands, crosses the room, and kneels beside me.
“Let me check your wounds.”
I should tell her to keep her distance, should rebuild the wall she keeps walking through. But she is already unwrapping the bandage on my side. Fresh bandages at the ready, traded for her work. Her fingers are warm and careful and steady, and I can smell the alcohol she is using before she applies it, sharp and clean, and underneath it the scent of her skin, herbs and warmth and something that makes the bond pull tight in my chest. I don't want her to stop.
The fever has settled into a dull burn, not gone but not climbing. Her herbs are working, her stitches are holding. She cleans the wounds and rewraps them with fresh cloth. Her hands don't shake, and I watch them again because I cannot help it. I hear her heartbeat, close and steady, layered beneath the sounds of the village outside, and it is the calmest sound I have heard in years.
“You should sleep,” she says. “I'll keep watch again.”
“You can't keep watch every night.”
“Try me.” She settles back against the wall beside me. Not across the room. Beside me, close enough that if I shifted my weight my arm would brush hers. The warmth of her body reaches me before her words do. “We have a pattern now. I talk, you sleep, the rage stays down. We keep doing it until something changes.”
“And if something changes for the worse?”
“Then I throw things at your head. We've been over this.”
