Circe did not know what pulled her from sleep so suddenly. There was no loud noise, nothing she could point to as a cause. One moment she was deep in a kind of dreamless sleep, and the next she was sitting upright in bed with her eyes wide open and her heart already beating fast.
She sat there for a moment and let her gaze move over the room. Nothing seemed to be out of place from what she could see. Yet the feeling that something was amiss did not leave. It sat on her skin like a hand pressing lightly at her shoulder, subtle and insistent at once. It rose the hair at the back of her neck.
She noticed then that Ragnar was gone. His side of the bed was empty, the sheets cool enough that he had been up for some time. Normally she would have registered his absence and gone back to sleep without a second thought. But her head was clear, her body alert, and her limbs were already swung over the edge of the bed before she had made any conscious decision to move.
