Chapter 69: I’m Naked in this Water

Azura’s POV

Then looked away again, properly this time.

He came out a few minutes later and walked past me toward his pack without saying anything. Pulled out dry clothes. Changed right there, right in front of me, like I was not sitting three feet behind him.

I was absolutely not watching.

He finished and turned toward me.

"Go wash."

I looked at the river. Then at him.

"You need to leave first."

He stopped. That flat expression.

"No."

"I am not undressing with you standing right there."

"You need to wash. I need to stay. Those are the options."

I stared at him. He stared back. Neither of us moved.

Then he turned around. Arms crossed. Back to me, facing the trees.

"Go," he said. "I am not looking."

I studied his back. His very broad, very still back.

"Fine."

I found a spot behind a wide rock near the bank, close enough to the shore to still see him, far enough to pretend I had some dignity left in this forest. I got in fast. The cold hit like a shock, clean and sharp, and then settled into something that felt almost good against skin that had been dirty and tired for too long.

I washed quickly. Scrubbing everything, working through my hair, trying not to think about how long the night had been or where Liona was right now or whether any of the others had made it through.

But the water felt too good and I slowed down without meaning to.

Then I turned to reach further along the bank and saw it.

His reflection in the water. His head turned just slightly to the side. Just enough.

He was watching.

I spun around.

"Rhydor!"

Silence.

"You were watching me."

He did not move. Did not turn. "I was looking at the trees."

"The trees are on this side of the river."

"Exactly," he said, perfectly calm. "That is why I was looking in that direction."

I grabbed two handfuls of water and threw them at him as hard as I could. It hit his face with a sound I found extremely satisfying and soaked straight through his shirt.

He did not flinch. Did not react at all. Just stood there getting wet.

I threw more. Harder.

Nothing.

I gathered everything I could and launched it all at once.

His eyes moved slowly from the trees to me. Water dripping down his face, running along his jaw, his expression completely unchanged. Looking at me like I was mildly interesting at best.

"You are going to regret that," he said.

"Am I?"

His eyes moved toward where my clothes were sitting folded on the bank rock. Something shifted in his expression. Too quick, too subtle.

My stomach dropped.

"Rhydor. Do not."

He walked toward my clothes.

"Rhydor. Put those down. RHYDOR..."

He picked them up. Held them. Looked at me in the water with absolutely nowhere to go.

"I AM NAKED IN THIS WATER."

He tilted his head slightly. "I know."

He turned toward the other direction and started walking.

"RHYDOR!"

He kept walking.

I scrambled out of the river so fast I nearly went face-first into the bank. My hand caught the rock and I grabbed the nearest thing I could reach, his coat, the heavy one sitting right there on a stone, and pulled it around my shoulders as I ran after him, soaking wet and furious and fully prepared to fight him.

"Give me my clothes back right now."

He stopped. Turned. Looked at me standing there in his coat, dripping, breathless, my hair plastered across my face.

His eyes moved over me once. Slow. Then came back up to my face.

"No," he said.

"Those are MINE."

He held them up. "These?"

"YES."

He looked at them. Then at me. Then at the clothes again. "They are wet."

"Because YOU were..." I stopped. Breathed. "Give them back."

He considered them for one more second. Then he turned and threw them toward the river.

They hit the water with a small, sad splash.

I stared at where they had landed. Then at him. Then back at the river.

"I hate you," I said.

"I know."

I stood there in his coat, cold and dripping and completely out of moves, and he just looked at me with that expression that gave away nothing and somehow everything at the same time. Something underneath it. Something that was almost soft if you knew where to look.

Then, without a word, he walked past me, went to the river, bent down, and pulled my clothes out of the water. Wrung them out carefully, slowly, without rushing. Walked back and held them toward me.

I snatched them from his hand.

He stood there while I held them against my chest, still wrapped in his coat, still trying to remember how to breathe at a normal pace.

"Rhydor."

He waited.

"Thank you," I said. Quieter now. "For not leaving me back there. For carrying me. For..." I pulled his coat tighter. "All of it."

He was quiet for a moment.

Then, low enough that I almost missed it:

"I am not leaving you."

I looked up at him. His face was still closed off the way it always was. But his eyes held something different right then. Something real was sitting just behind them, something that did not have a name yet but felt important.

"Why?" I whispered.

He looked at me for a long moment. Long enough that something hopeful and stupid started happening in my chest. Then he turned and walked back toward the river to collect his things.

I stood there in his coat with my wet clothes pressed against me and watched him go.

Warm. Despite the cold ground and the cursed forest and every impossible thing that had happened since the sun went down.

I was warm.

****

I dressed behind the rock and came out wringing the last of the water from my hair. Rhydor was sitting on a flat stone near the bank with his back to me. His shirt was pulled down off one shoulder.

I saw the wound before I could look anywhere else.

In the daylight, it was worse than I remembered. The dark mark at the center had grown, spreading outward in uneven lines beneath the skin. The flesh around it had that deep, wrong quality, too dark, too still, as if something had moved in and made itself comfortable there.

He felt me staring. He always did.

He looked back over his shoulder and caught me looking directly at it.

I opened my mouth to talk about something else. The river. The trees. The weather. Anything.

"You need to let someone look at that," I said instead.

He pulled his shirt back up over his shoulder. Said nothing.

"Rhydor. It is getting worse."

"I know."

"Then do something about it."

"There is nothing to do."

"There has to be..."

"Azura." Flat. Final. A door closing. "Drop it."

I wanted to argue. I wanted to grab him by the shoulders and make him understand that I could see it spreading, that nothing about what was happening to his skin looked like something a person could simply ignore. But the look on his face stopped me cold. Not the usual cold. Just tired. The deep kind that sleep does not fix.

I dropped it.

I sat beside him on the flat stone. We stayed there together for a while, not talking, not needing to. Just two people who had survived the night, sitting in the first real quiet the Wraithfen had allowed us.

****

I stood when it felt like time to move again, wringing the last water from the ends of my hair, trying not to think too hard about any of it. His shoulder. His eyes by the river. The way he had said he was not leaving me, like it was simply a fact he was reporting.

But everything collapsed when I felt it.

A small pain in my shoulder. Just a pinch. I shifted and ignored it.

It came again. Stronger this time.

I rolled my neck, trying to shake it off.

The third one came like something driving straight through the bone.

It dropped me to one knee. No sound came out. My hand flew to my shoulder, and my jaw locked, and my eyes shut tight, and I stayed there on the cold ground, breathing through it while the pain moved in deep waves that felt entirely wrong. Not like a muscle. Not like an injury. Like something shifting inside me that had no business shifting.

Rhydor was in front of me before I had registered him moving. I could feel him crouching close, his hands coming toward me. I could not see his face. My eyes were still pressed shut.

"Azura."

But the voice that said my name was not his.

It was soft. It was female.

It was mine.

I went completely still.

I opened my eyes.

And I was looking at my own face staring back at me.