My nails dug into the thin fabric of the shift that did little to keep out the cold or contain any warmth as I lay on the scratchy blanket covering the bed beneath me. The shift that was comfortable to sleep in if you didn't feel the cold also did little to protect my skin from the repeated rake of the jagged edges of my nails. I could feel my side that shared a matching mark with Silas grow raw and irritated under my attention. My fingers couldn't help but reach for the mark; scratch it. If I left it alone, the irritation and need to itch I felt was far worse than the irritation I was experiencing right now.
But that was the least of my worries. My biggest one was getting out of here.
And breaking the rest of this damn fever.
While one hand continued to scratch at my side where the mark that matched Silas's was etched into my flesh, the other rose to land on my forehead. As the back of my hand dropped to hit my heated head, the slap of flesh rang out in the room. The dizziness I felt could be attributed to the warmth and clamminess my skin still held. I felt better with each passing minute, but the sickness I still felt clinging to me seemed slow to seep from my blood. The aches and pain in my body when I had gone to bed were worse, but not as bad as they had been when I had first awoken with a fright.
Shaking off the memory of what I thought I had initially woken to, an illusion crafted by a fever and a nightmare. It had been real far too many times for me to brazenly hold my head up against it on the off chance that it wasn't. I didn't stop to wonder if what I had caught a glimpse of before curling defensively was real or not. My racing mind was too preoccupied with trying to run through memories to find what could have been the latest offense I had committed that he would come to beat me for it in the middle of the night. It was only when I came up empty-handed with pieces that didn't fit that they started falling where they belonged. My confusion quickly cleared as I began to recognize where I was and who had woken me.
That was when the humiliation hit. A ghost of it struck again at the memory. I hadn't been cowering away from my father, I had been cowering away from Rowan. I had reasons to as he had proven my first night here, but they were the same reasons I didn't want him seeing the depths of my fears. I never wanted anyone to see them.
Yet he had looked right into the well that loved to drown me every so often.
And the look that awaited me as I shook off the last of my nightmares to see him crouched before me...
I hated that look.
It saw too much.
It saw the truth of such a reaction.
And I had seen what I needed to through a crack in the door to know that Rowan not only saw it, he understood it.
Dropping my hands the the bed with a sigh, I began the taxing effort of pushing myself up. It took a few grunts but I managed to sit upright with my legs hanging over the edge of the bed. I let out a groan, wondering how I was going to go about attempting escape in my state when sitting up had taken so much out of my exhausted body that just wanted to lie back down and sleep again.
The only things that had me pushing to rise to my feet were not knowing if an opportunity like this would arise again anytime soon and no longer having the same motivations I had previously to hold off. Whatever had pulled Rowan away, it had been unexpected and had him departing in a rush, one fast enough to leave room for mistakes.
Now, I just had to find them. Before he returned to catch me in the act again.
Now that he knew I was still after his portal key, he wouldn't let it fall into my hands again. My chances of finding another with Silas would be greater than finding the one I had used incorrectly again. Trying to do so would just be wasting time and searching the Queen's wing for one was out of the question. Setting foot in there held a higher rate of losing my head than finding a key.
