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“What happened out there?” she asks.

Neither of us is eager to answer her.

“Evanae’s grace. You two are behaving like children,” Inara says and sets the tray down. She points at me. “You are going to take a seat,” then at Valdus, “and you are going to finish cooking dinner. Understood?”

Valdus rolls his shoulders back and leaves without saying another word. A prickle settles behind my eyes as my ankle forces me back down into the armchair.

“Does this hurt?” Inara asks as she presses a clean cloth over the split skin on my face.

I only shrug, unable to meet her eye or mutter a word without choking on it. Inara doesn’t press further and only keeps cleaning the wound. She drops the blood-stained cloth back on the tray when she’s satisfied with her work, and I miss the prickle on my skin. At least it held back tears.

Inara takes a deep breath, as if the burden of the words she’s about to utter is too heavy for her. “It wasn’t Valdus who hurt you, was it?”

“Maker, no. I ran into someone. Numair is his name.” If anything, Valdus saved me in that alley.

Inara sighs. “That boy…”

“We fought.” The words spill out of my mouth of their own accord, and the tears follow right after. “I tripped and split my skin on the cobbled street. And I think I sprained my ankle.”

I tell her everything, no longer being able to stop the flow of words and not sure I want to. Inara doesn’t interrupt me but unlatches the laces holding my boot in place. She rubs a cypress oil into my swollen ankle with a soft caress. By the time I tell her everything, the last of my tears have run their course and my face is splotchy and prickling.

Inara sets my foot down just in time for the door to open again. Valdus walks in with a bowl of soup drifting steam and filling the air with a mouth-watering smell. He glances at us only once, puts the bowl on the nightstand for me and walks to the window. We hear a screech of metal as the window refuses to close, but his mechanical arms win that battle, and it shuts down, along with my only connection to the exterior. In another second, he’s out of the door. It closes with a silent click, but for how loud it echoes in my mind, he might as well have banged it shut.

Inara sighs and shakes her head.

“I’ll talk to him,” she says, putting the small bottle of oil on the nightstand. “I’m not sure he’ll listen, though.”

The first stars dot the steel-blue canvas when I spot a figure climbing the steep road toward the house. A faded-black scarf covers his head, but his metal arms give him away.

I haven’t seen Valdus in a week. Not even a glimpse through the window, but I limp back to the bed before he can catch me watching.

I stare at the fissure in the wall and count my breaths. I can hear the door to the house open, then, he drops his bag down on the kitchen floor. Valdus and Inara exchange their greetings. The steps grow closer, and then a knock comes. I’m surprised to hear it, wondering what I should say.

“Are you decent?”

The man must have already seen me naked and now he asks for my permission? I think to myself.

“I didn’t. Inara tended to you.”

My cheeks flare up when I realize I said that one out loud. “Come in,” I croak.

Valdus walks in with a bowl of an oatmeal porridge and jam and a steaming cup of tea in his hands. I watch him settle my meal on the table and turn toward the door.

“Wait,” I hasten to say. I haven’t waited for a week for him to show up in my room so that he could leave in less than a minute. Valdus stops but doesn’t turn around, but that’s all the encouragement I need. “I’m sorry for running away the other day…well, not running away…more like slipping out. I never planned for you to find out.”

“So, there was a plan?”

Heat floods my cheeks, and I bite my tongue for the slip. I’ve gone over what I was going to say over a thousand times, yet as the words spill out of my mouth, I don’t seem to have any control over them.

I clear my throat, fidgeting with the round button on the cuff of my shirt. I’m a princess of the Empire of Usmad, but I’m not as brazen as any of my sisters.

“Maybe we could start over?” I ask in a small voice.

Valdus turns to me with a lifted brow.

“You say, ‘my name is Valdus,’ and then you ask for my name, and we talk for a while.”

“I already know your name.”