🔹️THORNE
The silence between us was heavier than the stones I'd spent all afternoon hauling to the western ramparts. My muscles burned—a dull ache that usually helped ground me—but tonight, physical exhaustion was no match for the sensory assault of the woman standing five feet away.
​The room—my room, our room—felt like it had shrunk.
​Althea moved with a stoic, mechanical grace, setting her few belongings down as if she were marking territory in a minefield. She hadn't looked at me once since we left the infirmary. She was a statue of ice and steel, her expression fixed in a mask of indifference that made my own chest tighten with a frustrated, jagged heat.
​"The bed is yours," I said, my voice sounding like ground gravel. "I'll take the floor."
​"There is no need," she replied, her tone flat. She didn't even bother to glance my way. "It's your room; I will take the floor."
​"It's our room," Umbra grumbled in the back of my mind.
