He Was Looking For Lyra (Alistair's POV)

I shifted Cassian's weight in my arms, stood, and walked toward her.

The moment he slipped into her embrace, every muscle in his small body let go at once. He tucked his face into the curve of her neck, and his breathing evened out—slow, steady, like a stone finally settling into the riverbed where it had always belonged.

I stood there and watched, and something in my chest came loose. I couldn't name it precisely. Only that it had been compressed for a very long time, and now, through some hairline crack, a sliver of light was getting in.

Lyra held him and looked up at me. Her eyes carried a question, a trace of wariness, and something else—an emotion that the moment had struck loose, which she was already in the process of pushing back down.

"You being here," she said. "That's not a coincidence."

"No."

I sat down across from her and told her what had happened that morning.

After I dropped her at the Croft building, the original plan was to return to the office and work through the backlog, then collect Cassian from the hospital in the afternoon once he'd been cleared for discharge. The doctor's assessment the previous night had been straightforward—if his vitals held, the paperwork would be simple. I'd had my assistant coordinate everything in advance. There was no reason it should have gone wrong.

Then a phone call pulled me back.

When I pushed open the door to his ward, the hallway was already tense. Two nurses stood just outside, speaking to each other in low, clipped voices. I walked faster. Inside, the doctor and two other nurses were gathered around the bed—the white sheet stretched flat and undisturbed across a mattress that held no one.

"Where is Cassian?"

No one answered immediately. One of the nurses raised her hand and pointed toward the bed. Not at it. Beneath it.

I crossed the room and crouched down.

He had wedged himself into the narrow gap between the bed frame and the floor, knees drawn up to his chest, back pressed against the wall, his body made as small as it could possibly be. In front of him, a cup lay on its side, milk pooled and spreading across the tile around him. He hadn't moved. He wasn't looking at me. His gaze was fixed on something that didn't exist—a lamp with no bulb left inside it.

I didn't call out to him. I didn't reach in to pull him out.

I just crouched there, and waited.

The doctor spoke quietly behind me. They'd brought breakfast at six-thirty and found the bed empty. It had taken nearly twenty minutes to find him. The intake log showed zero food consumed—nothing since the previous night.

I absorbed that information and kept my face still.

"Cassian," I said, quietly.

He didn't respond.

I stayed on the floor and waited until, finally, his gaze drifted back from wherever it had been, and he turned to look at me. His eyes were exhausted and unfocused—the eyes of someone who had been searching for something and had not found it.

Then he moved.

He reached into the breast pocket of his hospital gown, slowly, with the careful deliberateness of someone retrieving something fragile, and held out a folded piece of paper.

I took it and opened it.

A pencil sketch. The lines were spare, but the composition was precise—a woman in profile, a sketchbook across her knees, a pencil in her hand, light falling in from the left and tracing her outline clean and clear.

I looked at it for a long moment.

I recognized her. The likeness was accurate enough that it didn't require interpretation. Less than an hour earlier, we had been sitting in the same car together.

He was looking for Lyra.

I didn't know when he'd drawn it. But I understood what it meant. He had no way to tell anyone, no way to say the name out loud—so he had drawn her instead, and waited for someone to understand.

I folded the paper back along its creases and put it in my inside jacket pocket.

"Let's go," I said. My voice came out steadier than I expected.

He hesitated, then slowly crawled out from beneath the bed and stood. His clothes were damp with spilled milk. His hair was disheveled. The pallor of his face tightened something in my chest. I found a clean set of clothes in his bag, changed him, straightened his collar. He stood through all of it without pulling away, but without leaning in either—just still, and present, and somewhere far away behind his eyes.

I picked him up. He didn't resist. But he didn't tuck his face against my neck the way he had last night in the arms of that stranger.

He simply let himself be carried. Quiet and worn through.

I got him discharged, put him in the car, and told the driver to head to her hotel.

I didn't deliberate over it. It was the most direct solution available. The only one, as far as I could see.

In the car, he leaned against me with his eyes closed—asleep, or choosing not to be awake, I couldn't tell. I looked down at him. In the afternoon light, his lashes caught a faint trace of gold. The pallor made him look younger than five, more breakable than he should have had any reason to be.

I thought about the way he'd reached into that pocket. The slowness of it. The care. Like he was handing over something he'd been guarding for a long time.

What I felt in that moment wasn't only sorrow. It was something more complicated and harder to name—sorrow shot through with something that wasn't quite hope but was adjacent to it. He was still reaching out. He hadn't sealed himself entirely inside that dark, narrow place.

After the length of time we'd been fighting this, that was the best news I'd had in a long while.

In the hotel lobby, he went rigid in my arms. I felt it before I saw it—the sudden alertness, the way his whole body reoriented. I followed his gaze.

Lyra was standing at the entrance, just in from outside, squinting slightly, wearing the particular exhaustion of someone who had been running on fumes since before sunrise. Her eyes found us and her steps stopped.

Then Cassian's eyes went red, his arms shot out toward her, and the sound that came out of him filled the quiet lobby without warning.

I stood, carried him to her, and passed him over. I watched him settle into her arms. Watched his shoulders drop. Watched him press his face to her neck and breathe.

Lyra looked up at me with those careful, guarded eyes, waiting for an explanation.

I told her everything. Then I reached into my jacket, took out the folded paper, and handed it to her.

She opened it and looked down. I watched her face—watched the confusion shift into something more layered, something she didn't quite manage to keep composed. She said, quietly, that's me, not as a question. She refolded the paper and put it in her own pocket instead of returning it.

Cassian lifted his head, looked at her once with those still, dark eyes, then settled back and closed them again.

We went to the café. The server brought a muffin and warm milk. He sat in his chair, looked at the plate, and didn't touch it. Then Lyra broke the muffin in half, took one piece for herself, pushed the other toward him, and looked at her phone as though he wasn't there.

About three minutes later, he picked it up.

I turned toward the window and said nothing.

He finished that half, then slowly pulled the other piece across the table too, eating in small, unhurried bites, with the focused attention of someone treating it as serious work.

It was the first thing he had eaten all day.

I was holding my coffee cup. I felt my fingers tighten around it, then release.

Lyra asked whether he was always like this.

I shook my head. "It doesn't usually look like this," I said. "He doesn't typically express what he needs by hurting himself." Because Cassian, as a rule, did not express what he needed at all.

He finished eating, slid down from his chair, and came to lean against Lyra's arm, resting his head near her shoulder, eyes closing.

Soft background music moved through the café. The afternoon light came through the glass wall in long, even panels and fell across his face.

I looked at him for a long time.

Then I said the thing I had been working out since the drive over: "Miss Vane—would it be possible for Cassian and me to stay in your room tonight?"