Chapter 114

Abby

The Luna’s bed was too big.

I had worked in these rooms for two weeks. I had signed letters at the green leather desk and read reports by the tall windows over the lake and once, at four in the afternoon, fallen asleep on the window seat with my cheek on a list of patrol rotations. But I had never slept here. Every night, I had gone down the corridor and climbed into Kade’s bed on the side away from the wound, and lain awake listening to him breathe.

Now I lay on my back in the middle of a bed that had been Cassandra’s for twenty-seven years, and the sheets were cold, and they smelled of nothing at all.

That was the worst part. Not the size of it, or the quiet. The smell. For two weeks I had slept with my face in his pillow, in cedar and woodsmoke and the faint, clean edge of Daphne’s antiseptic, and Diana had settled every night like a dog on a hearth. Here there was only clean cotton and the cold coming off the windows, and Diana paced.