By the time the archive lamps are lit, my lip has stopped bleeding and my hands have stopped shaking.
I keep my head down at my table so nobody asks about my cheek.
Then boots come up the archive stairs, heavy and even, and I know who it is before he reaches the top.
Caelum. Alpha heir, dark green coat, and the only person here who knocks on a door he's allowed to walk through.
Caelum: You're still here.
Riona: The book's not finished.
Caelum: It's nearly dark, Riona.
He unrolls a map across my table and it's torn right down the middle.
The paper's gone soft as cloth, and the river line breaks where the tear runs.
Caelum: Boundary map. The north line. Nobody can agree where it runs anymore.
Caelum: I need your eyes. Not the Luna's, not the council's. Yours.
He leans over my shoulder to hold the corner flat, and I smell cedar and cold night air on him.
He's close enough that the heat of him lands on my neck, and I don't step away.
My face goes hot and I hate that it does, and I still don't move.
His breath moves the hair by my ear, and I have to make myself look at the paper instead of him.
Caelum: Can you read it?
Riona: The hand's old. My grandmother's grandmother wrote like this, all hooks and shortcuts.
Riona: Give me a minute and I'll give you the line.
My finger traces the tear and his hand sits on the paper beside mine, broad and steady, close enough that I feel it.
He doesn't tell me to hurry. He just waits, and being waited on like that feels like being believed in.
Being believed is a thing I don't get handed much.
Caelum: Who split your lip?
Riona: I fell.
Riona: On a shelf. The shelf won.
It's a bad joke and he doesn't laugh, and his jaw goes tight in a way that makes me feel seen.
Also like a problem he wants to take apart with his bare hands.
Caelum: In this room you're the archive mender, and nobody puts their hands on the archive mender. Not even your mother.
I don't answer, because if I answer I'll cry, and I'd rather swallow glass than do that in front of him.
The door opens again and Gilda comes in with sweat drying on her neck and her training vest worn thin at the shoulder.
Gilda: Your Alpha-ness. Didn't know you read maps.
Caelum: I don't. She does.
He steps back to the window and gives us the room, which is a thing Alphas almost never do.
Gilda: Good. Two minutes and one thing that isn't for his ears.
She leans over my shoulder like she's checking my stitching, and her hand closes over mine under the table.
Something small and cold presses into my palm. Black iron, shaped like a wolf's tooth.
Gilda: Fighter trial pin.
Riona: Gilda, I can't. If my mother finds out I put my name in...
Gilda: Then don't let the miserable bitch find out.
Gilda: You fight like you've got something to prove, and that's the good kind.
Gilda: Nine days. Train at dawn, and keep that pin where nobody sees it.
Gilda: If your family swings at you again, swing back. You're allowed.
I close my fingers around the pin until the tooth bites my palm, and it hurts, and I'm glad.
Gilda's bruise was proof I was getting stronger. This little piece of iron is proof somebody thinks I already am.
Caelum rolls the map up slow, and his fingers brush mine on the paper and stay there a heartbeat too long.
Caelum: Get some sleep, Riona.
I lie in my narrow bed with the pin under my pillow, and tonight I don't feel like a stain.