Page 104 of The Girl Who Fell Through Time
Selene rolls her eyes. “You’re not dying, Soren.”
“Feels like I am.”
She wonders if he—and maybe Ariella too—downplayed how sick he was because they knew Dorian wouldn’t want to leave if he knew. Soren is practically his brother, after all. It makes sense that he’d be like him. Dorian likes to disguise how bad he feels, too. She’s grown used to Dorian’s discomfort feeling like her own. She’s surprised to find herself feeling a similar way about Soren.
“Can I get you anything?” she asks him.
He shakes his head. “No, but… if you want to stay here for a bit longer, I won’t kick you out.”
He says it like he believes he’s capable of rising from the bed and physically manhandling her out of the door, which seems unlikely. She rinses out the cloth and reapplies the compress. Taking his hand seems a bit too far, but she pulls up a chair and sits beside him.
“Dorian told me about Luna,” she tells him.
He opens an eye. “Luna?”
“The woman he lost.”
“Oh.”
“You didn’t know her name?”
“Dorian is very… secretive about her.”
Selene watches Soren carefully, noting the slight furrow of his brow, the way his fingers twitch against the blankets—one of them bandaged. He shifts, wincing as he tries to find a more comfortable position, but his exhaustion keeps him from moving much.
“You knew about her, though,” she says, watching for his reaction.
Soren’s eye slides shut again. “He never said much about what happened between them, just that it was his fault.”
Selene frowns. “Do you believe that?”
A long silence. Then, quietly, “Dorian thinks that everything is his fault and everything is his responsibility to fix. He’s rarely right about it, though.”
“That sounds like him.”
“Dorian’s the best man I’ve ever met,” Soren murmurs. “Him, and his father. I didn’t even know there were good people in the world until I met them. Well, I knew good people existed, but—”
“Not kind ones,” Selene finishes.
Soren nods.
“I think you and I are the same there.”
Soren stiffens. Something like a tear trickles down his cheek. It might just be sweat. Or pain. Selene brushes it away.
“I’m sorry I was awful to you when you first came here,” he says quietly.
“That’s all right,” she tells him, dabbing at his forehead. “It’s hard to be nice when you’re hurting.”
“Dorian manages it.”
“Well, we’ve already established that he’s exceptional.”
Her gaze drifts back to the shelf of wooden figurines, then to the stack of books beside his bed—a curious mix of adventure tales and books on poison, lest anyone forget Soren had once been an assassin. The bindings are worn, the pages curled at the edges from years of being thumbed through.
“Do you have a favourite?” she asks, gesturing to the books.
Soren huffs a tired breath. “Are you planning to read me a bedtime story?”
