“Sit down before you fall down,” Seraphina said, “and don’t argue with me about it.”
Lucien, to his evident surprise, sat.
They’d made their way back to the study, the fire built up again by some unseen hand of the castle’s own keeping, and Seraphina had wrestled a basin of water and a stack of clean linen out of a startled Agnes before the older woman could do more than raise an eyebrow at the state of his lordship’s shoulder.
Now Lucien sat in the worn leather chair by the hearth, coat and shirt both shed to the waist, watching Seraphina with an expression caught somewhere between amusement and genuine bewilderment as she knelt beside him with the basin balanced on her knees.
“You do realize,” he said, “that I have survived three hundred years of considerably worse than a shadow-beast’s claw.”
“I do realize that. I also realize you were bleeding on my behalf ten minutes ago, so you’ll forgive me if I’d rather not simply take your word for it that you’re fine.” She dipped the linen into the basin, wringing it out with more force than strictly necessary, and pressed it, as gently as she could manage, against the torn skin of his shoulder.
He hissed through his teeth, but didn’t pull away.
“You’ve done this before,” he observed, watching her work with the careful, practiced motions of someone who’d clearly tended wounds long before tonight.
“My mother taught me. Before she disappeared.” Seraphina kept her eyes on the wound, not entirely willing to look up and find whatever expression had settled onto his face at the mention of her mother again.
“She used to say it was foolish to live somewhere without knowing how to patch yourself up, since help wasn’t always going to come running when you needed it.”
“She sounds,” Lucien said quietly, “like she understood a great deal more about the world than most people manage.”
“She understood enough to keep secrets from me for eleven years and then vanish without explaining any of them.” The words came out sharper than she intended, old hurt bleeding into her voice before she could stop it.
She pressed the linen more firmly against his shoulder, and he let out a low breath, more startled than pained.
“I’m sorry,” Lucien said.
“That wasn’t fair of me, to speak well of her when you’re the one left carrying the weight of what she didn’t say.”
Seraphina looked up at that, surprised by the sincerity in it.
“You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“No,” he agreed.
She held his gaze a moment longer than she meant to, something in the honesty of the observation settling oddly warm in her chest, beside the faint, quiet hum of the mark.
“You’re better at this than I expected,” she said finally, returning her attention to the wound, now cleaned enough to see it wasn’t as deep as the blood had made it look.
“Understanding people, I mean. For someone who’s spent three hundred years locked away from most of them.”
“I’ve had a great deal of time to think about very little else,” Lucien said.
“Loneliness makes a strange sort of scholar out of a person. You start noticing things about the people who do visit — Agnes, the few merchants brave enough to trade with a cursed house, the occasional fool who wanders in looking for treasure and leaves considerably wiser about what kind of castle this actually is.” Something wry touched his voice.
“It turns out, when you have three centuries and nothing else to spend them on, you become quite good at reading people. Whether you wanted the skill or not.”
Seraphina reached for a fresh strip of linen, beginning to bind the wound properly now that the worst of the bleeding had stopped.
“And what have you read from me, then? In the — what has it been, a day?”
“A day,” Lucien agreed, “and yet I find I already know more about you than I’ve learned about most people in decades.” His voice had gone quieter, more careful, watching her hands move with a focus that made her acutely aware of how close they were sitting, how little space remained between the edge of the chair and where she knelt at his side.
“You ask questions until you get real answers, not comfortable ones. You’d rather walk toward danger than spend one more night not knowing the truth about it. And you tend wounds like someone who has spent a great deal of her life being the person who takes care of others, rather than the one who gets taken care of.”
Seraphina’s hands stilled on the linen.
“That’s a lot to gather from one day.”
“I told you. Three centuries makes a strange sort of scholar.” His voice had softened further, something unguarded creeping into his golden eyes as she finally looked up to meet them.
“I don’t think anyone has tended a wound of mine with their own two hands in longer than I can properly remember, Seraphina. Most people in this castle are, understandably, more afraid of me than concerned for me.”
“I’m not most people.”
“No,” he said, low.
“I am beginning to understand that rather thoroughly.” Follow the newest chapters on novelping.com.
The fire crackled, and for a long moment neither of them moved, the quiet between them stretched thin and warm, charged with something neither of them had named yet but both, clearly, felt building at the edges of every careful word exchanged since she’d knelt at his side.
Seraphina finished securing the linen with hands that weren’t quite as steady as they’d been a minute before, and found, when she looked up again, that Lucien hadn’t looked away from her once.
“There,” she said, quieter than she meant to.
“It should hold, if you don’t go picking any more fights with shadow-beasts before it heals properly.”
“I make no promises,” he said, though the corner of his mouth curved, faint and unguarded, in something that wasn’t quite a smile but came close enough to unsettle her further.
“Thank you. For this, and for whatever you did in the garden that turned the tide of that fight. I’m not entirely certain I would have walked away from it without you.”
“Then I suppose we’re even,” Seraphina said.
“You’ve kept me alive twice since I walked through those doors. It seemed only fair to return the favor.”
“Twice,” Lucien repeated.
“And it’s been less than a day. At this rate, Seraphina Vale, I begin to fear what the rest of your visit is likely to demand of either of us.”
Something in the way he said it — low, wry, edged with a warmth that hadn’t been there in their first careful conversation — made her breath catch, unexpectedly, the mark beneath her collarbone giving a slow, deliberate pulse that felt less like alarm now and more like recognition, quiet and insistent, of something neither of them had yet found the courage to name.
“Maybe,” she said, holding his gaze, “it isn’t a visit anymore.”
Lucien went very still at that, something raw and startled moving behind his eyes, and for one long, suspended moment, Seraphina thought he might say something to close the last remaining distance between them — some admission neither of them was quite ready to survive the weight of yet.
Instead, he reached out, slow and careful, and tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear, his fingers lingering a heartbeat longer than the gesture strictly required.
“No,” he said softly.
“I don’t suppose it is.”
The fire burned low and warm between them, and outside the study’s single window, the thousand lights of the garden drifted on, patient and unhurried, as though the castle itself had settled in to watch exactly how long it would take the two of them to stop being careful with each other at all.