Chapter Text

Chapter 70

“You’re saying there’s nothing to be done?” Rhysand asked steadily. He sat in the chair pulled to the bed’s edge, his knees spread wide to make room for the proximity as he held a clean cloth to his sister’s nose that wouldn’t stop bleeding. Feyre stood behind him, constantly massaging his shoulders.

Cassian grunted in agreement and raised his brows at the healer.

“You are not hearing me, High Lord,” the ancient female said. “Physically there is nothing to be tended to. It is something beyond my senses and capabilities.”

“You must have something for her.”

“I can leave some herbs if you’d like,” Majda proclaimed. “They won’t do much except make a nice tea though.” Rhysand sighed but nodded and offer his gratitude for the healer’s efforts. Madja returned him a grim, wrinkled smile. “She has come back from the dead, High Lord. Perhaps her body knows that it has messed with what ought to be.”

Cassian couldn’t smother his glare at those words. At what it meant. With that, the healer collected her wares and left the bedchamber. Feyre moved from her mate’s side to Cassian’s, her feet angled to the door. “Would either of you like anything? Something to eat or drink?”

Rhysand shook his head mutely. Cassian smiled at her and gave her arm a light squeeze. “No, but thank you.” Feyre nodded and with one last look towards the bed and her mate, left them to be. He sauntered closer to the bed, leaning down and bracing his hands on the end frame. “She doesn’t get a damn break, does she?” he remarked through a laugh that was as empty and dry as a barren desert.

“Neither have you,” Rhysand said, tearing his eyes away from his sister for the first time since Cassian had hauled her into the town house. His throat bobbed. “Don’t think I don’t appreciate everything you’ve done for her.”

Cassian wasn’t yet over Rhysand’s meddling with his memories—a fact which his brother knew would be held over his head for a long time to come. But he couldn’t help but wish he never knew the truth. Tamlin, the fight, seeing the aftermath. The memory he had up until a week ago had been hard, but it hadn’t been… That. “She’s worth fighting for, Rhys. I’ll do it every day until I’m dead.”

Rhysand turned his head back to her, removing the cloth to check. The bleeding had slowed but was still constant. “Which you will be soon if you don’t get that break.” Cassian frowned. “I want you to go to the mortal lands for a week. Lucien is down there. You don’t have to work, just… Drink, eat, sleep. When’s the last time you got a full night of sleep?”

“Last night,” Cassian answered truthfully. “I don’t need a break.”

Rhysand quipped a small, sad smile. “You don’t want to leave her,” he corrected. “It’ll be best for both of you. She’s grown dependent on you, Cass. And I have a feeling you have to her as well. How are you going to take being away from her? What if you have to leave for a month? Two?”

His fingers flexed around the wooden frame as his rolled his neck in a moment of thought. “Then I have to leave. You’re asking me to leave her when I don’t. When she’s not well.” Cassian shoved off the frame, folding his arms instead. “You said you didn’t find what you were looking for at the Day Court. What is it exactly that you were hunting?”

“An answer for this.” Rhysand moved a hand down to her wrist, thumbing the harsh scarring. “The dreams she’s had—I think she was stuck somewhere. It’s why I could bring her back after all these years.”

~

Arwen rubbed at her eyes, quietly climbing down the staircase of the town house to the lower floor. She had a hankering for something salty to eat and she wasn’t sure how late it was when outside of her window was nothing but starlight. As she turned onto the main floor, eyes set on the kitchen towards the back, the floor creaked behind her. Arwen glanced back but had her heart set on the kitchen.

Rhysand had come into the hall from the sitting room. “I didn’t hear you wake,” he breathed and eradicated the distance between them.

“I thought everyone would be sleeping,” she told him, letting her eyes close as he placed a hand on the back of her head and kissed her hairline. “Do you have nuts around? Preferably salted?”

“Nuts?”

Arwen nodded and turned back to the kitchen. Rhysand’s steps trailed behind her and she began scavenging through all the containers and cupboards. “Where’s Cassian?”

There was a pause before he answered. “Cassian has gone to visit Lucien.”

Smiling in success upon finding a crumpled bag tucked away in a corner, she held it to her chest and scoffed. “Visit Lucien? Cassian would rather have his nails pulled out.”

Rhysand muttered something behind her. Arwen turned and dug her hand into the bag. “He’s gone to the mortal lands,” he added. “He’ll be back in a week.” A week? Arwen now sensed the lack of his presence. Her brows pushed together over the bridge of her nose, forming a large wrinkle as she stared at the ground between them. “How are you feeling?”

She shrugged, still caught on the fact that Cassian wasn’t nearby. Not just out of the city, but out of Prythian.

“You sort of collapsed out of nowhere, sweetheart. I’m not expecting fine to be an answer.”

“I’m hungry,” she said a bit snippily, holding up her nuts.

His eyes dropped to it. “That’s something I suppose.”    

“And I want Cassian back.”

Rhysand’s nose flared with another hefty sigh as he braced his palm on the island bench at his side. “It’s only a week.”

She knew that. Arwen knew that it was only a week and she had lived far longer without their company before. But she needed his hand to hold. Her lip trembled in a weak attempt to smother down the utter and absolute panic through wrought through her at that moment. Her fingers whitened around the paper bag. Arwen tossed it behind her on the bench, knowing that she very well might drop it and send her snack spilling.

Her mind spiralled into a world of haze, sinking down into to deepest points of her darkest thoughts.

Rhysand appeared at her side, bringing her into a wing-enclosed embrace. “I know,” he whispered, rocking their bodies. “I know, sweetheart, I know.”

~

Arwen trekked back to her bedroom, paper bag crumpled under her grip. It was her old chamber, though the carpet had been removed in favour of a wooden floor that felt soft and smooth under her feet. Like Rhysand had told her, it had been emptied of her belongings, but the bed was the exact same. And the closet now had some of her old dresses lining them. What was most unusual, though, was the slumped Illyrian form in the vanity chair pulled near the window.

Arwen had noticed him when she woke, but pushed his presence aside in favour of her now satisfied hunt. Placing her food safely on the bed, she crept up to him and lifted his hanging chin with her fingers. “That is a terrible place to fall asleep,” she said as Azriel jerked himself awake. Arwen was surprised that he was even in the town house. For the past week he had been relentlessly avoiding Rhysand like he was prophesied to be the harbringer of a plague.

He waved his hand across his face, his fingers latching onto her retreating ones as though he was going to push them away. But he held on to them instead. He took a moment to examine her and then the room. “I didn’t want you to be alone.”

“I’m hardly alone,” she murmured, drifting away from him and back to her bed, bringing the bag into her lap. The lack of his touch hit her harder than she expected. “Rhys and Feyre are still downstairs awake, and I swear I can almost feel Nesta’s glare through the walls.”

Azriel’s lips twitched into a morose smile. “Because the company of two mates that can’t keep their hands off each other for a single night and a female that knows only how to hiss are pleasant company.”

Arwen plopped a cashew into her mouth. “There’s Elain too,” she prompted, just to read his face as her name was spoken. He only held her gaze, unreadable as always. “But I think she’d rather speak with the dirt than me. Perhaps you are right.”

“Elain,” Azriel drew out quietly, “Would much rather speak with dirt than to anybody here.”

Arwen cocked her head. “That’s not true and you know it.” His head bowed, eyes pointing at the hands he clasped between his knees. “I’ve missed this room.” Arwen ran her hand along the blanket, gazing upon the oakwood dresser and the matching vanity, the large mirror attached to it. She couldn’t help but wonder how she would sleep knowing that Cassian wasn’t just a hallway away. There had only been one night she had spent here without him and she had barely slept, but that was for other reasons.

“Me too.” He seemed surprised by his own admission, clamping his lips shut and taking a moment to reopen them. “This is the first time I’ve been in here since…”

“I died? I’m not afraid to hear those words, Az.” Kicking her feet onto the bed, she rested against the headboard. “There’s no pretending it didn’t happen.”

“It feels like it was only days ago.” Arwen shot her brows to her hairline. His chest strained against his leathers with a long inhale, rubbing his hands together as his stare remained fixed on them. “Side-effect of having a memory given back,” he explained. “It feels new. Fresh. I can’t close my eyes without seeing it. I keep feeling the moment the mating bond broke and I knew…” Knew she was dead.

Arwen kept her breathing even as she placed the paper bag aside. Her throat bobbed hard and heavy as she shifted her legs off the edge of the bed once more. Azriel finally looked up as she approached him. He looked so utterly, lethally handsome under the moonlight. In the shadows where he belonged. One curled around his ear at that moment, no doubt whispering something that only he could hear.

Azriel stood. Arwen rose to her toes, slowly winding her arms around his neck. His hands immediately explored the canvas of her scarred back, one smoothing across the low of her spine and capturing her side, the other hooking over from the back of her shoulder, caging her in.

She breathed in his very scent, making a prayer that it would never leave her memory. Her fingers cinched around one of his leather straps, lips pressing into the muscle of his shoulder as she watched the winking stars beyond the window behind him. The tips of his fingers snuck under the hem of her pants, the pad of his thumb trailing back and forth across the bone of her hip.

The embrace quickly crossed a line between sweet comfort and something else. Arwen unwound her arms and peeled away with a generous stride backwards. His grip came loose immediately. He cut out her memory for a reason. It didn’t matter what he could say—she had to watch him slice each piece of her out of his life like she was the décor on a cake that nobody wanted. “I need sleep.”

Azriel nodded his head as though he was accepting an order. “Of course.”