Page 99 of Labyrinthine
They scatter.
I don’t sit. I don’t speak. I just watch the back of him—broad shoulders rigid, eyes fixed on the far wall, breath barely rising. He looks like a man ready to storm a battlefield. Or break apart.
The healer arrives quickly. Too quickly. Someone must’ve warned him.
He bows low. His hands are steady, but his voice isn’t. “My Lord. My Lady. May I…?”
Mallen gestures for him to begin.
The moment the fabric is cut, I see it in the healer’s face. The shallow slashes across my arm. The bruising near my wrist. The way the skin breaks like a lie unraveling. The healer murmurs a few words I don’t hear. I feel Mallen’s stare on every inch of exposed skin.
He doesn’t say a word. Not to me. Not to the healer. He doesn’t need to. The silence says all of it. He thinks Darian hurt me. And that I let him.
“I fell,” I say quietly. “The horse spooked. I got caught in the trees.”
Still nothing.
The healer wraps my arm. Presses gently at my ankle.
“Sprained,” he says. “Not broken.”
Mallen’s voice is quiet, but deliberate. “How badly?”
The healer’s pause is long. “Bad enough.” He pauses again. “It’ll heal in a day or two.”
Mallen’s shoulders tense.
There’s anger there. Jealousy too. A possessiveness I’m not sure I know what to do with.
I feel sick.
He wanted proof my ankle would not carry me, that I could not have fled, that Darian was not dragging me anywhere I did not choose. That I did not find a way to spend time with him. Proof from a stranger’s mouth, not mine. Not to catch me in a lie, but to stop imagining one.
And the truth in that hurts more than I want to admit.
The healer bows and flees. The door clicks shut. A servant knocks, and Mallen waves them away. The room is too full of truth to let anything else in. I don’t even realize I’m shaking until Mallen steps toward me. Not angry. Not cold. Just…impossibly still.
“Where did he take you?”
I flinch at the question. It shouldn’t hurt. But it does.
“He didn’t take me anywhere. The horse bolted. I fell. He was the only rider strong enough to keep up. Nothing else happened. I swear to you?—”
“I believe you.”
He says it too quickly. Too easily.
“You don’t,” I say.
He closes the distance between us. Not looming. Not threatening. Just present. And aching.
“I believeyou,” he says, slower this time. “I don’t believehim.”
The shift starts small. I barely notice it. And then it’s sharp, and suddenly it’s seismic. A shift that leaves a fracture in its wake.
It doesn’t matter whether he believes me. Not if my whole sense of self hinges on which man manages to sound more convincing.
Not if I keep bending with every wind that blows stronger than me.
