Chapter 134

Kade

I woke because nothing hurt.

It took me a moment to understand that was what had woken me. For six weeks I had come up out of sleep the same way every morning, slowly, through a fog of Daphne’s draughts, with the wound already waiting for me at the surface like a dog at a door. I would lie still with my eyes closed and take stock of it before I moved. Where it was worst. How far the threads had crept in the night. Whether I could sit up on my own or would have to wait for someone to come.

This morning I lay in the gray light with my eyes closed and reached for it, out of habit, and it wasn’t there.

There was something. A weight, low down in my chest, heavy and still, the way a stone is still at the bottom of a pond. I could feel it if I went looking. But it didn’t move. It didn’t pull. It didn’t burn. It lay curled at the bottom of me, asleep, with Knox stretched out across the top of it like a guard across a doorway.

I breathed in all the w