"How did you get water on you?" He questioned quietly, moving the wet strands of hair away from her face and tucking them behind her ears as she looked down at herself and the confusion on her face shifted into something closer to unease.

"Ivy..." She whispered, staring at her drenched sleeves. "I saw her in my dream...she turned into water and splashed onto me when she disappeared. It was a dream but I have water on me. That is impossible." Viola murmured, almost as if she was talking to herself rather than to him, her brows pulling together as she turned her hands over and looked at them like they belonged to someone else.

Sebastian was just as confused but he kept that off his face when he noticed the fear beginning to creep back into her expression and the color leaving her cheeks. He put his hand on her shoulder and brought her attention back to him gently. "Don’t worry about that right now. Would you like to change your clothes first?" He asked, and she gave him a wary nod.

Sebastian guided her back to the bed and then walked to his closet and pulled out his robe for her to wear in the meantime. When he held it out to her she took it with the absentminded look of someone whose thoughts were still somewhere else entirely.

He was considering stepping out to give her privacy to change when she surprised him by pulling the healing gown off without warning. He turned away quickly, but not quite quickly enough to avoid catching sight of the sharp curve of her hips and the soft roundness of her backside, and the wound on her back that immediately redirected every other thought because the sight of it sent a quiet and controlled rage straight to his gut.

Damn, it looked bad. Sebastian thought, his fists clenching at his sides. The wound was angrier than he had imagined it from Matt’s description and yet she hadn’t said a single word about it since she woke up.

Not one complaint. He had never known a woman as small in frame and as enormous in spirit as she was, and she never failed to astonish him every single time he thought he had figured out the shape of her. 𝘧𝓇ℯ𝑒𝓌𝑒𝑏𝓃𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘭.𝒸ℴ𝓂

Had it been his sister with a wound like that on her back, Sebastian knew without question he would not have heard the end of it. Zoe could make a production out of a paper cut and hold everyone around her emotionally hostage for days over something that would heal by morning.

But his mate was something else entirely. Something he was only beginning to fully understand. One in a million, wolf or no wolf.

She pulled the robe on and covered herself, pushing her arms through the sleeves and pulling the belt loosely around her waist, tying it at the front before she lowered herself slowly onto the bed and sat there staring down at her hands in her lap.

Sebastian cleared his throat. "Would you like something to eat?" He asked, and as he had half expected she shook her head.

He didn’t push her on it. He had already arranged with Gilbert to have nourishing injections added to her IV drip to keep her hydrated and sustained while she was still finding her way back to herself, so he wasn’t worried about that.

"Something to drink then?" He offered, and she turned to look at him.

"Yes, please. Thank you." She said quietly, and when Sebastian turned to walk away to fetch something for her she noticed the slight drag to his step and her eyes narrowed.

"What is wrong with your leg?"

He glanced back over his shoulder. "It is taking its time healing. The bone in my thigh took some damage from one of the bullets. It is getting better." He said simply and kept walking before she could ask anything further. He didn’t want her worrying about him anymore than she had already done. She needed proper rest and time to also heal.

He came back with a cup of tea, which he recalled to add a lot of cream like she liked it and placed it in her hands. She held it without drinking, staring down into it with the look of someone trying to remember how ordinary things worked.

Sebastian watched her quietly. He had expected her to wake up irritable and full of complaints about the pain and the discomfort, and finding her like this instead, silent and lost inside herself, was harder to sit with than the alternative would have been. He would have preferred she found reasons to argue and fight with him at this point.

"How are you feeling?" He asked.

She gave him a small smile that didn’t fully reach her eyes. "Better. Just a little discomfort in my back but I will be fine."

"Do you want to talk about your dream?" He asked gently, keeping his voice soft so she understood there was no pressure behind the question. He just wanted to see her come back to herself. He would take her at whatever pace she needed.

She was quiet for a long moment, her fingers tightening slightly around the warm cup as if deciding, and then she gave a slow nod. "It felt so real it didn’t feel like a dream at all. It was like I truly saw her and held her. She was there, smiling the way she always did..."

"Does seeing her make you happy?" He asked.

Viola nodded, wiping quickly at her cheeks with the back of her hand. "It does. But she told me to live my life and stop trying to find her. How am I supposed to do that when I don’t know what happened to her? I became your wife because I wanted to give her a better life. What am I supposed to do with my life now?" She whispered, the words coming out like she was asking herself rather than him, her hand moving across her face again to catch the tears before they fell too far.

To be quiet honest with herself, after everything she had been put through over the past four years, Viola would have chosen a quiet life if given the option. A small and ordinary one where nothing could reach her and nothing was expected of her.

But a quiet life would have meant no way to find her sister and no way to protect herself from the people who would have come for her anyway, so the choice had never truly been hers to make.

She had wanted to give this second chance at life entirely to Ivy. Everything she had done, every painful and humiliating and dangerous thing she had walked through, had been framed in her mind as an act of repentance, a way of paying back what she owed.

Now that she had no idea what had become of her sister, it felt like the ground had been pulled out from under the only reason she had been standing on it. She felt like she had no life. Nothing to want to live for and nothing to make good of. Lost in a way that had no clear direction to it, like a single pin dropped in the middle of a vast and directionless ocean with no shore visible in any direction.

The Ivy in her dream had wanted her to be happy. Had told her to live. But Viola had spent so many years surviving rather than living that she had genuinely begun to forget what pure and uncomplicated living even felt like. The difference between the two had blurred somewhere along the way and now, without the purpose that had been carrying her forward, she felt the absence of it in every quiet moment like a hollow she didn’t know how to fill.

"I don’t know what to do anymore." She added, very quietly.