Page 72 of Nights of Blood and Magic

She wanted to argue, to tell him she didn’t deserve warmth, but the words didn’t come. She nodded, a broken motion.

Lysander hesitated a moment longer. Then he turned towards the bathroom.

Idonea watched him through the blur of her lashes.

After pumping hot water into the tub, Lysander stayed only long enough to test the temperature.

He returned and extended a hand.

Idonea ignored it. She pushed herself up, legs unsteady, but she refused to lean on him. Her body protested every motion, but she kept her chin high.

Idonea hesitated at the threshold.

“I’ll be outside,” he said.

She gave a curt nod and stepped inside. The door shut behind her with a solid click.

Steam curled around her, coaxing warmth into frozen limbs. She stripped down, piece by piece, peeling off layers heavy with sleet. Her fingers were stiff.

She lowered herself into the bath, breath catching as heat met cold. Her body tensed, then eased by degrees. The ache in her muscles softened.

But the warmth couldn’t touch what ached deeper.

Idonea tilted her head back against the edge of the basin and closed her eyes. The daemon’s sigil burned behind her eyes.

She tried not to think of the girl on the chapel steps. The hand raised, frozen. The smallness of her under the snow. She tried instead to think of nothing: of the heat against her shoulders, the wet shape of her hair against her neck, but the mind goes where it likes. It went to Dyota.

Not the day. Not that day. Idonea had learned, years ago, not to let it go to that day. Dyota had been four. They had been in the bath together, and Dyota had wanted to wash Idonea's hair and Idonea had said no, because Dyota washed hair like an angry crab, all grip and no rhythm. Dyota had pouted. Then, with the genius of a child too young to argue, she'd sunk down to the chin in the water and refused to come up until Idonea agreed. Bubbles around her nose, one eye visible above the waterline, accusing.

Idonea had laughed, sharp and against her will, and given in. The fingers in her hair had been clumsy. The water had gone cold. Nellith had come in eventually and found them both with their fingers gone wrinkled, Dyota humming tunelessly, Idonea's scalp aching from her sister's terrible careful work, and Nellith had said out, both of you, you're turning into raisins, and had wrapped them each in a separate towel and carried Dyota out into the kitchen on her hip while Idonea trailed behind dripping.

Dyota had smelled of the soap their mother made then. Rosemary and something else, something Idonea had been too young to name. She had tried before, in the years after, to place it. The lack of the word for it sat in her like a missing tooth.

The bath water lapped against her own collarbone. She didn't open her eyes.

She was four — She made herself stop the thought there. Anything past that was speculation. Speculation was worse than not knowing.

Her hands floated, pale and trembling. Another girl dead, another failure.