A rumble of thunder wakes me up. I open my eyes and blink. It's still completely dark, and the rain is pattering steadily on the roof. The air is chilly. I try to turn to my other side to go back to sleep, but something prevents me from doing so. There's something in my bed.

There's someone in my bed.

Still not quite awake, I recoil instinctively. I would have fallen down from the bed if it wasn't standing by the wall. Then my brain kicks in and I realize it can only be one person.

He's lying with his back to me, wrapped in my blanket. He has taken the whole blanket for himself, so it was probably the cold as much as the thunder that woke me up.

"Hadrian?" I prop myself on one elbow. "What're you doing here?"

He turns to his other side and lies with his face to me, his hand under his cheek. He doesn't meet my eyes, staring somewhere in the area of my chest. I try to gauge if he's delirious again. During the last few days he's been too week to stand on his feet, but now he clearly did get up to climb into my bed. Is he better? I automatically reach to check his forehead for fever, the way I did many times while he lay unconscious. It turns out he's way too conscious now, for he swats my hand away before it touches his face.

"Don't get any ideas," he says.

"About what?"

"About me... being here."

He sounds coherent. A good sign.

"Do you know who I am?" I say.

He gives me a deprecating scowl. "Of course I do."

I shrug. "You've been calling me Mortimer for the last few days."

His eyebrows go slightly up. "Was I...talking in my sleep?"

"You were delirious. You nearly died."

"Oh." He pauses. "Did I...say anything else?"

"Nothing that made sense. You've threatened to have me executed a lot."

He snorts. "Oh well. I must have had a reason."

"Do you have a reason to be in my bed now?"

He looks at my chest again. If he feels better, there's no need to give him any special treatment, so I could kick him out of my bed and get back to sleep. Yet the relief of seeing him back to his normal—if annoying—self is worth savoring. It's partly my doing. I took care of him and kept him alive.

The thunder rumbles again. He flinches and moves a bit closer to me. I remember the supper in the castle on the day I lost my eye. Him, Ferox and Aurelia eating together, trading jokes. Ferox berating him for getting drunk every time there was a thunderstorm.

"Are you afraid of thunderstorms?" I say.

"No."

"Get out of my bed, then."

He doesn't move, doesn't look at me.

"You are afraid of thunderstorms," I say.

He looks up with a frown. "Don't you dare to laugh."

"I never do."

He pauses. "Why not?"

"Don't change the subject."

"I didn't," he says. "I think I never actually saw you smile. I'm curious. Were you born without the ability?"

I shrug. "I guess I started normal. But when you see the people you love being butchered to death, it takes the fun out of things."

He keeps quiet for a while.

"It's a terrible thing to witness," he says at last. "But as the years pass, the pain dulls a little. You move on. You can't dwell on such things for the rest of your life."

"I could never move on."

"Did you try?"

My annoyance rises like a wave. "Shut up. You can't have an opinion on this. You've been pampered and protected all your life, never had to watch your loved ones die like I did. You don't know what that feels like."

"Maybe I do," he says.

"Oh, come on," I snap. "Ferox was armed and trained to fight, not to mention he had a bunch of knights and soldiers fighting at his side. He could at least have tried to protect himself. And your father had a bit of a bellyache before he died, but --"

"Maybe I wasn't talking about them."

I pause as the words sink in. Then, a particularly loud bout of thunder goes off above us, and I'm surprised by Hadrian's hands wrapping around my waist and his face pressing into my chest.

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