Midnight soup-b

"I'm feeding you." He turned. His voice was quiet but there was something raw in it. "You're carrying a child, and you've eaten nothing but crackers for three days. Rhys told me. Orla told me. You're thin, you're gray under the eyes, and I'm not going to stand in this room and argue about what you were to me while you faint on the floor."

"I don't *faint.*"

"You nearly did on Tuesday."

"That was—"

"The water in the north wing. I know. I've heard that one." He pressed his fingers against his eyes. "Please. Please, just eat. And afterwards, if you want to shout at me, I'll stand here and take every word. But eat first."

She almost said no. The refusal was right there, hot and clean and satisfying. She wanted to knock the soup off the stove. She wanted him to see exactly how angry she was.

But the smell had reached her. Chicken, and something green, and pepper. Her stomach, which had been in open rebellion for six weeks, turned over once and then went hollow with a hunger so sharp it frightened her.

She sat down at the table without a word.

He ladled the soup into a chipped blue bowl and set it in front of her with a spoon and a folded cloth. Then he stepped back and stayed where he was, standing, arms at his sides, like a servant waiting to be dismissed.

"You can sit," she said stiffly.

"I'll stand."

"Dante."

He sat.

She ate. The first spoonful was so hot it burned her tongue, and she didn't care. The second was better. By the fifth she'd stopped tasting it and was just swallowing, the way you drink when you've walked a long way. She didn't look up. She didn't want him to see her face. A bowl of plain chicken soup shouldn't undo a person, but her eyes were stinging and her throat had gone tight, and she bent lower over the bowl and kept eating.

He didn't speak. He tore a piece of bread in half and set it by her hand. When the bowl was empty he filled it again without asking. He peeled an orange, carefully, in one long spiral, and laid the pieces on a saucer, and she watched his hands do it, those huge scarred hands, and thought: *Nobody has ever done this for me.*

It wasn't a dramatic thought. It was a small flat fact, and it broke something loose in her chest.

She had taken care of everyone. She had stitched split lips and held sick children and sat up with the dying. When she was ill herself she'd made her own broth and eaten it alone on the edge of her bed, and told herself it was fine, that it was what being an omega with no family meant. She had never once been on the receiving end. She hadn't known how it felt, to be a person someone peeled fruit for.

It felt like grief. That surprised her.

"Hey," Dante said softly. "Hey."

She realized she was crying. She put the spoon down and pressed the cloth to her face. "I'm fine."

"You're not."

"I'm *fine.* It's hormones. Orla says it's hormones."

"Lyra, look at me."

"I'm not crying about you."

"I know." He had moved without her noticing. He was crouched beside her chair, not touching her, his hands loose on his knees. "You can cry about me, though. If you want. I'd deserve it."

She laughed, a wet, ugly sound, and then she was sobbing in earnest, bent forward over the table with the damp cloth against her mouth and her shoulders shaking. It went on for a long time. She cried for the closet, and the engagement, and the little room with the brick view. She cried for the girl who'd said *okay* because she didn't know how to say anything else. And she cried for a mother who hadn't lived to see her find out she was pregnant, a mother who could have said what the silver mark meant and what it would cost.

Dante did not try to fix it. He stayed where he was, close and silent, until the worst had passed. Then he picked up the cloth, wiped her face with it, and said nothing at all.

That was almost worse. It was so gentle.

By the time she'd finished the second bowl, the clock on the shelf said one-forty.

"You should go," she said.

"I know."

He didn't move. He had taken the other chair at some point, and he sat with his elbows on his knees, watching the stove with an expression she couldn't read.

"They'll notice if you're gone," Lyra said.

"Rhys is covering."

"For how long?"

"Until I tell him to stop."

She pulled the quilt off the bed and wrapped it around her shoulders. She hadn't realized how cold she was. The fire made a small orange circle on the floor, and past that, the corners of the cabin sank into shadow. She thought: *this is what it would be like. This is what a house with him in it would sound like.* The soft tick of the stove. The wind in the chimney. A man's breathing across a room.

It was a dangerous thing to let herself think.

"There's something I need to ask you," she said.

His head turned. "Anything."

She'd rehearsed it all day. *I heard you. I heard you and Seraphine in the records room.* She had the sentence ready in her mouth, and she looked at his face, tired and open in the firelight, and she saw what was waiting there. He would lie. Not a big lie, just a kind one. He'd say *it's nothing,* or *you misheard,* or *not tonight, please.* And she would have to sit across a table from that, and watch him do it.

Or he would tell her. And she would never forgive him.

*If she knows what her mother did, she'll never forgive me.*

She realized, with a small cold shock, that she didn't want to know. Not yet. For once in her life she had a little warmth, and a bowl of soup, and a quilt, and she was not ready to throw them into the fire.

"Why this cabin?" she said instead.