Alaric woke slowly, the way a person surfaces from deep water.
The first thing he knew was warmth. The second was weight, a soft, sleepy weight pressed along his whole side, a hand curled loosely over his heart. The third was sound: a small, steady, contented breath that he knew better than his own name.
He lay very still and waited for the old dread to come.
It did not.
The cold silence he had braced for, the awful emptiness of a room where someone has stopped breathing, was not there. Only the quiet hum of a house full of sleeping people, and the pale gold light of morning filtering through the heavy curtains, and his wife, warm and alive and snoring faintly into his ribs.
He turned his head. Her mouth was open. A strand of red hair had stuck to her cheek. She looked, in that moment, like the most precious thing in the entire world.
I slept, he thought, dazed. I slept, and I did not hurt her.
His heart gave a happy, startled thump against her palm.
