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“Tell me a secret,” Amélie whispered against her shoulder.
Angela stared at the ceiling above, counting tiles and traveling old paths she’d mapped out before Amélie had come back into the picture. Long nights where the dark held more teeth than it did comfort, and there were no patients she could tend to.
Angela was quiet for a long, long time. She tangled her fingers through the obsidian waterfall of Amélie’s sweat damp hair, stroking. She thought about the secrets she held, the lifetime’s worth of sin she could share and spill. The guilt that chased her like a starving hound, the regrets she carried on her scarred shoulders like Atlas.
But Amélie already knew about those particular demons. Had remained at her side when they snuck through in sleep, seizing her in a panic; it had only been the inhuman chill at her side and Amélie’s silent, watchful eyes that had pulled her through it. Sometimes, Angela wondered if Amélie ever slept after they were done.
She wondered when she’d grown comfortable enough to fall asleep with Talon’s assassin still in her bed, trusting to wake up in the morning.
“A secret,” Angela murmured. Amélie did not jump, didn’t even move as if Angela’s words had stirred her from rest. “Fine.”
She wriggled on her side, and Amélie shifted with her, cradling her head in the crook of her strong arm and laying another muscled forearm around Angela’s waist, the tips of her frigid fingers playing against the metallic knobs of her spine.
“I have never felt more safe,” Angela confessed, “than I do any night you are with me.”
Amélie said nothing. Angela was not bothered by that; she had not been expecting it. She did feel something in her spread its wings, fluttering free, when Amélie pulled her every closer and rested her cool lips against Angela’s pulse, wrapped around her. Angela closed her eyes, sank into the ice Amélie’s embrace offered, and allowed her brain to rest.