024— NO ANSWER.

        ~KAI~

Niko was in the kitchen.

He looked up when I walked in. Looked at my face. Looked at the time on the wall. Looked back at my face with that expression I knew too well.

He said nothing.

For five entire seconds.

"Good morning," he said pleasantly.

"Don't."

"I haven't said anything."

"You're about to."

"I was just going to ask how you slept." A pause so carefully timed it was almost artistic. "In your room. Your own room. Your own bed."

I looked at him.

He looked at his coffee.

I got my own coffee and sat down and we existed in silence. Neither of us was going to be the first to make it a conversation.

Niko lasted four minutes before…

"The pillow thing was her idea I assume."

"Niko."

"Just confirming details."

"Drop it."

"Dropped," he said. "Completely dropped. Gone. I've already forgotten we had this conversation."

He had not forgotten. He was never going to forget. This was going to be deployed against me at an inconvenient moment and we both knew it.

Elena appeared in the doorway ten minutes later.

She was smaller than Sloane. Softer around the edges. She stood in the doorway in an oversized shirt and looked between me and Niko with cautious gray eyes that were startlingly familiar.

"I don't — sorry. I don't know who you are," she said.

"Kai," I said.

"Niko," Niko said, already pulling out the chair beside him. "Sit. I'll make you something."

She sat. She had that very careful way of moving. I noticed it and said nothing about it.

"Are you Sloane's friends?" she asked.

"We're keeping her safe,” I said. "Silvercrest wolves have been tracking her. She's been staying here while we handle it."

"Oh." She processed this quietly. "So you've known her. How long?"

"Long enough," Niko said, setting a plate in front of her.

She looked at it. At him. "Thank you," she said. Then she looked at me. "Thank you for last night. For getting me out."

"It's handled," I said.

"You didn't have to," she said. "But you did." She looked at her plate. "I said something terrible to her last night."

"You were in shock," Niko said.

"I was," she said. "But she was alone this whole time. She found out about Dad and Mum and Elijah and she carried all of it completely alone and she still… she still tried to protect me from it." Her voice went very small. "I called her a liar."

Niko put his hand briefly on her shoulder. Said nothing. Just that.

She nodded once. Picked up her fork and ate in silence for a moment.

I watched her.

She was considerably more agreeable than her cousin.

"She held my hand," Elena said suddenly, quietly, like she was telling herself as much as us. "The night our grandmother died. I was eleven. She sat on my bed all night and held my hand and didn't sleep once." She looked at her plate. 

"That's who she is."

The kitchen was quiet.

I turned the ring once on my finger and said nothing.

                    …

At three in the afternoon I was coming downstairs when I saw them in the sitting room. 

The door was half open. I wasn't trying to see anything. I was walking past, that was all, but I saw them anyway and I stopped.

Sloane and Elena on the sofa. Elena's head on Sloane's shoulder, Sloane's arm around her, both of them still in the way of people who had said everything that needed to be said.

Sloane was smiling.

Unguarded. The kind I'd seen exactly once before through a security feed at midnight and had been unable to stop thinking about since. 

Tears on her face at the same time. Quiet ones, not distress, and she was smiling through them in a way that made the whole thing completely devastating to look at.

She looked up.

Our eyes met through the half open door.

I don't know what my face did.

I felt it happen, and whatever it was must have reached my expression because her smile changed. Didn't disappear. Just redirected.

At me.

I smiled back.

I didn't decide to. It simply happened the way her hand finding mine in the dark had simply happened. 

Before the part of my brain responsible for sensible decisions could weigh in at all.

I looked away first.

Walked the rest of the way downstairs. Into my office and closed the door.

Sat at my desk.

The ring turned once on my finger.

I thought about a smile through a half open door and what it had done to something in my chest and I thought about a lip I'd touched without authorization and footsteps that had started stopping outside her door.

I looked at my hands.

“What,” I thought, very slowly and very clearly, “is happening to me?”

The ring turned again.

No answer came.