Page 203 of The Mercy of Dawn

“I’m not hungry. I don’t—” Her voice cracked, and Mikael gave up his fight. It wasn’t worth it at all.

“Okay, okay. That’s fine.” Mikael ran a hand through his hair and took a slow breath. He settled on the sofa and managed a couple of bites of food, his own appetite suddenly absent. “I brought tea if you want that. Before it gets cold?”

A single offer and he wouldn’t push her any further.

To his surprise, fabric rustled softly and Cyril’s bare feet padded across the floor. The sofa didn’t even dip when she settled down on the cushion beside him, a mug clasped between her hands.

With her boney shoulders curled in, and her frame drowning in one of his shirts, the woman that sat beside him now was a shell of the one who once had no problem knocking him flat on his ass.

“Thank you,” she said hoarsely.

Hollowness hung in her eyes as she stared over at the fire, quiet and unmoving. Minutes passed, and she never took a sip of her tea.

“It’ll be okay, you know,” Mikael finally said, turning to face her. “It’ll take some time, but—”

Cyril’s eyes slid over to him.

“Please don’t say that.” Her words were tense and spoken with slow purpose. “Don’t tell me it’s going to be okay when you still have a home and your family, and your job and friends. When you still have your purpose, and a future ahead of you.”

Mikael, for possibly the first time in his life, had fucked up by simply existing.

“Cyr, I didn’t mean—”

“I have nothing left, Mika. It’s all gone. My home, and my family. My purpose.” Cyril’s voice wavered, and she unfurled from herself, a sheet of black hair slipping forward as she set her mug on the table. She blew out a slow and shaky breath, her shoulders shook on the inhale. “I just want to go home, but I can’t… It’s all gone.”

She didn’t fight Mikael when he pulled her over and got his arms around her.

“Maybe it won’t be okay. Maybe everything you had before is gone,” he said softly. “But we’ll take care of you here, Cyr. We’ll help you build a new home if you’ll let us, and my family will treat you like their own, whether you like it or not.” That, at least, drew a muted noise from her. He’d consider it a laugh. “And purpose? We will figure that out.”

“We?” she said.

The implication loaded in the single word should have terrified Mikael. We. Not just him or her as solitary people, but them.

It didn’t terrify him at all, though.

“We,” he confirmed, and for a long while, Cyril said nothing.

Her arms snaked their way around Mikael’s neck, though, and she nestled herself in. She was exactly where she belonged. Where, for the time being, he could keep her safe and shielded from whatever harsh reality awaited her next.

That was enough to leave him content for now.

“Do you want to get some sleep?” he asked, tracing idle circles on her back.

Cyril made a quiet, hesitant noise before she said, “No...I’m hungry.”

Mikael laughed.

Chapter 49

Two weeks passed and Cyril still hadn’t found it in herself to give Runa an answer.

The queen stressed Cyril needed to take her time in deciding if she wanted to renounce everything she had in Helia—which wasn’t much at this point—and become a ward of their family. But time wasn’t helping at all, because Cyril wasn’t any closer to knowing what she wanted to do than she was on that awful fucking day.

It hadn’t helped that the days sort of blended into one another. A normal thing, she supposed, for someone who spent most of their time sleeping.

Being awake meant treading dangerously close to having to process reality, and that wasn’t something she was fond of. It also meant having to find things to occupy her time, and that proved to be challenging.

After the weeks Mikael spent shirking his duties just to hold Cyril and all her broken pieces together, his backlog of work neared on offensive. It kept him tied up most days from breakfast until dinner, and Cyril didn’t have it in her to bother him often.