Page 183 of The Devil May Care

Five breaths later, I have done exactly nothing.

The blankets feel heavier, intentional. They don’t trap; they persuade. They ask very reasonable questions:Why would you leave this? Why would you trade warmth for cold stone, quiet for clatter, a sure thing for a test designed to enjoy your failure?

There’s a story in my head about discipline and duty and all the tiny choices that add up to survival, and for once it sounds like a story told to other people. People who aren’t here, who don’t have a sleeping prince tucked against their spine and a purring cat cementing them in place. People who haven’t earned ten minutes of nothing.

Ten minutes,I bargain, like time is selling trinkets and I’ve got money to spend.Ten and I’ll go. Twenty, and I’ll run. Thirty, and I’ll fly.

The hearth light is steady. Too steady. It throws a soft, orange wash across the ceiling that never flickers, not even when a log must burn down, not even when I hear it tumble with that tiny sighing collapse that always sends up a breath of sparks. No sparks. Just the idea of them.

I open my eyes wider. The room obliges me by staying the same, which is somehow both reassuring and wrong. Caz’s shelf along the far wall holds his things in exactly the order I remember—a stack of books, a folded shirt, a knife whose grip I have felt under my palm a dozentimes. The knife’s edge catches the light and holds it as if it has no choice. Shadows pool under the table and don’t bleed into the rug the way shadows usually do. They park. They behave.

George’s purr deepens, synchronizing with the slow thud of Caz’s heartbeat under my ear. The rhythms nestle into each other like teeth tumbling in a lock. I can feel my own breath falling into step between them—cat, prince, me, cat, prince, me—until the idea of changing that cadence feels like something only an unreasonable person would do.

I remember that I wanted water. The glass on the nightstand is beaded with condensation. Caz filled it before he crawled into bed. The picture arrives crisp, like a memory and not an assumption. My mouth is sand. I reach.

My hand doesn’t get there.

Not because I can’t lift it. I can. It just seems… excessive. The space between my fingers and the glass is suddenly a continent. A foolish, showy distance only people trying to prove something bother to cross. I let my hand fall back to the blanket. The fabric sighs like it’s pleased with me.

You’re procrastinating,I tell myself, faintly amused.You’re being human about it.The word human lands without offense; I am one. I’m allowed delay. I’m allowed softness. I’m allowed ten minutes of pretending the world doesn’t need me to act.

Caz breathes in, out, the steady ocean of it shushing any argument I might make with myself. He looks younger like this. The lines the throne carved in him are softer. The grim set of his mouth has unraveled. Even his horns, dark silhouettes curving through the lamplight, seem less like weapons and more like art. I have a fleeting, ridiculous urge to trace one and see if the texture is as smooth as it looks.

I don’t. I don’t move at all.

The Umbral thread hums, a cat in its own right, pleased with my decision. It doesn’t gloat. It doesn’t need to. It offers me the truth I want to hear;you have already done so much; let someone else be the one who claws their way out of bed today.

Ten minutes, I promise it, promise myself, promise a version of me who did not spend an entire childhood bargaining with clocks.Ten and I’ll do something. Ten and I’ll move.

Outside the window, which is mostly curtain and suggestion,something like light shifts. Not brighter. Not dimmer. Just… more. The way a word can feel fuller when you remember its second meaning. I close my eyes to rest them. Just my eyes.

The weight at my waist breathes in time with the cat and the fire that doesn’t flicker. My bones feel steeped like a wrung-out tea bag. The mattress has memorized me and does not wish to forget. The bed knows my name and is not done saying it.

Ten minutes, I think again, softer, like the thought has further to travel.

And then I stop thinking anything at all.

Caziel doesn’t wake.

That’s the first oddity that actually lands. He’s never been a heavy sleeper, not with the citadel breathing down our necks. Even when he’s pretending to rest, there’s a readiness in him, some coiled awareness that listens on his behalf. I’ve watched him jolt from dozing to standing in a blink because a hinge sighed at the wrong pitch.

Now his arm stays where it is, draped over my waist, the relaxed weight of it unchanging even when I shift my hips an inch to test him. His breath stays slow, deep, even. No catch. No little sound in his throat that means he’s coming back to himself. He’s here and he isn’t, perfect as a painting.

I tell myself this is nice. That I’ve earned one morning where nothing pounces when I move. I watch him the way I only let myself when he’s looking away, cataloguing the small details I never get to keep. The way his hair has come loose, a dark cut of his cheekbone. The faint scrape-shadow at his jaw he didn’t bother to glamor away last night. The Embermark at his throat is dim, banked, like the room has given it permission to rest too.

Familiar, I think, and some part of me loosens another inch.This is familiar. This is mine.

Except—no. Not mine. Not like that. Not safe either, if I’m being honest the way he asked me to be. Something in the air is waiting. Not a threat. Not a hand at my throat. A patient attention. Like a teacher with all the time in the world and a lesson that only lands if you don’t notice you’re paying attention to it.

The hearth light keeps performing the same popping crackles. Steady, too steady, on a loop. The way a heart monitor holds a line whenthe body beneath is not doing anything worth measuring. I look for the flicker that marks a room as real and find repetition instead—a beat that never misses, a glow that never stumbles.

I try again to lift Caz’s arm. Not to escape, just to prove I can, but the muscle yields only in theory. I slide my fingers under his wrist and have the strange feeling that I’m the one moving around a fixed point. I could sit up if I wanted. Icould. Want is the problem. It keeps stalling out on the way to my hands.

George is not helping. His purr has settled into a frequency that feels engineered. The vibration seeps into the mattress and then into my bones, a soft resonance that says you are exactly where you should be. He usually makes a production of being comfortable—shifts, kneads, announces—but now he’s a statue that breathes, four paws perfectly placed, not a whisker out of alignment.

“You’re ridiculous,” I whisper into his fur. The word gets swallowed. The room takes it and files it where it files everything it doesn’t need.

The curtains are closed but I don’t remember closing them. Not tight, no, that would be too obvious. There’s a narrow seam in the middle, a suggestion of dawn beyond it. The light that slips through doesn’t behave like dawn-light, though; it doesn’t throw a slash across the floor or blind my eyes. It hangs there, polite, like a guest who knows not to interrupt.