The sound of the water had resumed.
The hot spring cycling through its basin — the steady, mineral-clean sound of it doing its indifferent work — and underneath that sound, the specific, dense quiet that arrives in a room from which something loud and electric has recently departed.
Raven stood in the center of the private bath.
He looked at the space where Gareth had been for three seconds.
Then he looked at his own hand — the right one, the one that had moved sideways when Gareth's fist had come through the air — and examined it with the brief, clinical attention of someone checking the quality of their own response time.
The corner of his mouth moved.
Satisfied.
He turned to the bed.
Jennifer had not moved.
