He looked at her. His eyes were still red. Still wet at the corners, though he would have died before calling it crying.
"You," he said. His voice was hoarse — wrong in his chest, too tight, squeezed through something that was fury and humiliation and want and grief all pressed together into a shape that didn't have a clean name.
He crossed to the bed.
She pressed back against the wall — not entirely in rejection, but in the instinctive calibration of a woman determining the situation's actual nature.
"Young Master—"
"Shut up," he said. Then, immediately: "No. Don't shut up. I just—" He stopped. His jaw worked. He pressed his mouth closed again. Another thin bloom of blood from the split lip. He wiped it with his wrist. Looked at the red smear on his skin. Looked at her.
