Ch. 68

They found themselves caught in a stalemate the next afternoon, a lull between emergencies, the windmill creaking while a soft rain hissed against the roof. Carolina took inventory of blood bags and bandages, pretending not to watch Xander as he scrubbed the tiled floor, methodical as a surgeon, shirt half-unbuttoned and raw knuckled.

“I said you didn’t have to help,” she called from the open office door.

He shot a crooked smile over his shoulder. “And I ignored you. I’ve learned from the best.”

She rolled her eyes, but the conversation unraveled easily, and soon she joined him, each sweeping up the detritus of the last rush: clumped gauze, needles dulled by bone, a few coins Lyra must have dropped digging through the pantry.

For an hour, they worked side by side, Carolina occasionally humming under her breath—a lullaby her mother used to sing when the world was still small and danger was only a rumor. The ordinaryness of it was narcotic, tempting her to believe they might actually earn their peace.

During a pause, Xander straightened and pressed the back of his hand to his mouth, swallowing a cough. The gesture was quick, but not quick enough. Years of triage had trained her to see the minute betrayals: a tremor, a twitch in the jaw, the subtle tightening of the breath.

“You’re hiding something,” she said, kneeling beside him, the question blunt as a suture needle.

He hesitated. “Old injury,” he said, but the words were clipped.

“Show me,” she ordered, not unkindly.

He sighed, unbuttoning his shirt the rest of the way, exposing the pale ladder of scars across his ribs. One, angry and fresh, split the others, its wound neat but shallow—a knife, not a bullet. Carolina touched it with gloved fingers, gentle enough to not break the scab.

“Who?” she asked.

He shrugged, then looked out the rain-fogged window. “City doesn’t like when people start fixing things. Night shift crew at the substation. Guess they thought I owed them quiet.”

She cleaned the wound properly, applied antibiotic, and patched the skin with the kind of care she tried never to show.

“You need to tell me these things,” she said, exasperated, pinning him with a glare.

“I’m telling you now,” he said, contrite but grinning.

She might have laughed, but her hands shook, so when she finished the bandage, she let her palm rest over the wound, feeling his heartbeat as if to press it back into rhythm.

“I don’t want to watch you bleed out in my office,” she whispered, and he covered her hand with his, rough and warm, holding her there for an uncounted minute.

The silence stretched, not empty but thick, like sleep after a fever. Then a knock at the door shattered it. Wyn’s head poked in, haloed by the slantwise dusk. “Visitors,” she announced, before vanishing just as quickly.

Carolina stood and, unthinking, took Xander’s hand in hers as they walked to the front room.

A pair of women huddled by the door—one swaddled in homespun, the other with her face shrouded. Carolina set her jaw, prepared for blood, for plea or currency. Instead, the woman in homespun knelt and unclasped her cloak, exposing a baby no larger than a loaf of bread, its skin blue-tinged and lips cracked.

“Please,” she said, voice thick with accent.

Carolina motioned them in, stripping off her gloves, already cataloging the possible causes in her mind. Heart defect. Infection. Cold. She set the baby on the exam table, fingers working with practiced speed, checking pulse, pupils, the tightness of the child’s fists. The smell of rot was faint, but there.

She asked questions while she worked, but the mother only wept, rocking on her heels.

Behind her, Xander placed a gentle hand on the woman’s shoulder, steadying her.

It did not take long. The baby’s heart beat a rabbit’s pace, but the color only worsened as the minutes passed. Carolina tried everything, emptied her pharmacy shelf, improvised until there was nothing left to improvise. When the end came, it was with a whimper, not a cry, and she closed the tiny eyes with one thumb, blinking fast.

The mother’s grief filled the room like water. Carolina stood back, letting it wash over her, letting it splinter her composure. Xander gathered the woman in his arms, and the mother pressed her face to his sleeve and sobbed.

When Carolina finally met the other woman’s eyes—the shrouded one, still silent by the door—she saw a flash of gold in the pupils and realized, with a jolt, that the child’s death was not an accident but a message, a pattern repeating itself through the weak and voiceless.

After the mother left, carrying the still body in both hands, Carolina sat on the exam table and waited for her hands to stop trembling.

Xander looked at her with steady, tired eyes. “You can’t fix everything,” he said softly.

She drew in a ragged breath. “No, but I have to try.”

He stepped close, cupping her face in both hands, thumb grazing the scar at her jawline. “You gave her hope. Even if it wasn’t enough. Sometimes that’s all we get.”

She let herself lean into him, felt the knot in her chest loosen fractionally.

“Is this what we’re building?” she murmured. “A house that can hold grief as well as hope?”

He pressed his forehead to hers, their breaths mingling. “Better than what we had before.”

They stood like that for long minutes, letting the city’s sorrow and their own pulse merge.

Outside, the rain slowed to a drizzle, and the windmill’s battered sails caught the shifting light. Wyn hummed a song in the kitchen, and Lyra’s laughter echoed faintly from the yard as she taught the neighborhood kids to throw rocks at the House’s latest propaganda posters.

There would be more loss. More nights like this, and worse. But also mornings, and coffee, and the quiet miracle of having someone to catch you before you broke.

That night they made love with a ferocity born of mourning, exorcising the day’s failure in sweat and shivering. Carolina learned the taste of his shoulder, the salt of his skin, the way he said her name like a promise. They clung to each other, bodies knotted so tightly that for a few hours, the rest of the world receded.

After, she lay on his chest, listening to the ticking of pipes and the faint, uneven thump of his heart.

“You could leave, you know,” she said into the dark. “Start over somewhere quieter. No one would blame you.”

He ran a knuckle along her spine, slow and deliberate. “If I wanted quiet, I’d have died years ago. I want you. I want this,” he said, sweeping a hand to encompass their meager world.

She laughed, bright and unexpected, and felt her heart do something that might have been gratitude or joy, she wasn’t sure.

“Good,” she said, and nipped his neck. “Because I don’t like being left alone with my thoughts.”

He rolled her over, grinning, and they tumbled out of the sheets, into the messy possibilities of morning, and then to the day, and the next, and the one after that.

The war was over, but only for now, and they would remain in its fragile peace, tending to the living and the damned, learning—maybe for the first time—to build something that could last.

For the first time in her memory, Carolina looked out at the city and thought it could be beautiful, if only for a night.