Page 138 of Somno Slave

“He’ll crack,” he says. I can’t tell if he’s reassuring us or himself. His reflection stares back at him in the glass, cold and certain. “They all do.”

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Deogal

She looks at me differently now.

She thinks I do not notice. Humans always think pain makes them discreet. It doesn’t. Pain makes them obvious. It strips the manners from their faces, the careful little masks they spend years learning how to hold.

Rheda Ainsley watches me like grief has found teeth inside her.

Good.

That is where I need her. Not sympathetic. Sympathy is too clean. It’s too easily corrected by distance and sleep and a rational conversation with someone who thinks they know better.

I need her guilty.

I need her protective.

I need her angry at anyone who touches me.

I need her body to mistake my suffering for hers before her mind has time to interfere.

The bracelet was not sentiment.

It was a hook.

A pretty little thing around her wrist, delicate enough to look harmless, intimate enough to feel chosen. She touches it when she is afraid now. She does not know she does it. Thumb to metal. Pulse beneath silver. A doctor soothing herself with evidence she does not understand.

I gave her something to wear because humans believe in objects.

They believe in proof.

They believe if something leaves a mark, it must be real.

She is learning.

Tonight I will give her pain with a shape she can recognise. Something small enough to fit around her wrist. Something intimate enough to follow her when she wakes.

She will call it horror at first. Then she will call it connection.

The difference is patience.

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Rheda

Sleep takes me like a punishment.

One moment I am staring at the ceiling with my hand curled around the bracelet, thumb moving over the silver until the skin beneath it aches. The next, the room is gone, and cold air opens around me so violently my breath catches.

Stone.

Water.

The smell of old cloth left damp too long.

My stomach turns before I see him. Deogal is already on the floor. His hair hangs wet against his face, his shirt torn loose at one shoulder, skin marked in places my mind refuses to measure properly.