Page 166 of The Mercy of Dawn

Blood.

Not pools or lakes of it, thank the fucking gods, but enough splatter to raise concern.

He passed her empty bed, the linens half torn back and spotted with blood, and was moving towards her bathroom when a nagging itch compelled him to take one more look back.

From this angle, he glimpsed the gleaming black of the crown of her head, just in front of the sofa, and all the air left his lungs.

Slowly, he stepped around a discarded cushion and blanket, rounding another armchair, and Cyril was just…sitting there. Her eyes had a chilling vacancy in them, set on the burned-out hearth in front of her. She had her knees drawn up and a cloth-wrapped hand cradled against her chest. Oblivious to his presence.

Mikael kneeled beside her and Cyril’s eyes drifted over to him, all dark and brandished gold, and she blinked.

Once.

Twice.

One corner of her mouth tugged upwards, just slightly.

Mikael let out a slow breath.

“Hey, wrath.” He smiled as he brushed his hand up her shin.

No flinch, no movement, no reaction.

Even though her eyes fixed themselves on his face, it was like she was looking right through him.

He kept his tone soft as he said, “Something happened to your hand?”

Cyril’s lips parted and clamped back shut in a flash. She glanced down at her hand, at the cloth blotched with rusty brown, and nodded when she looked back up at him.

Oh. Something was very, very wrong.

Words were not something she usually had a short supply of.

“Can I look at it?”

She nodded again and extended her hand to him, her movements stiff.

He unwrapped the cloth slowly, turn by turn, until he uncovered a jagged wound that ran on an angle across her palm and, gods, it dipped all the way between her first two fingers. It surfaced on the back of her hand too, and had Mikael grimacing.

The entire gash looked half-healed, half-angry-as-hell, and it must have hurt like a bitch.

He hadn’t seen any broken glass or knives when he came in though, which begged the question of how…but Mikael was more preoccupied with the icy chill of her skin.

There wasn’t a lick of an ember left in that hearth. It must have been over a day since it died out, and gods knows how long of that she spent just—

“I didn’t mean to.”

Cyril’s voice came as a hoarse rasp as she pulled her hand back, and her eyes… Why did she look so afraid all of a sudden?

“That’s okay, Cyr,” he said as he sat back on his heels and watched her. “I’ll be right back with something to clean that up, alright?”

Cyril nodded absently, the wound across her palm having stolen her attention away from him. She flexed her fingers with a wince, turning her hand from side to side, as he got up and went over to the door.

If he wasn’t so fucking worried about whatever was going on in that beautiful head of hers, he might’ve taken a moment to appreciate the amount of force she put into jamming that chair under the door handle.

He leaned it against the wall and wrenched out the two books jammed under the door. Hopefully, Fae Ascension: The Sixth Edition and Considerations of Ascension weren’t of any real value to Cyril or the archives, because their bent-back covers and pages looked past salvaging.

Mikael took a slow breath as he opened the door because he knew, waiting on the other side—