Bane of the Wild Hunt (Heart of the Tithriall #2)

46. WHAT IS A THERAPIST?

Chapter forty-six

WHAT IS A THERAPIST?

Orion

M y heart was suddenly pounding so hard in my ears that I could barely hear the wind howling in them. But we were close to the mountain now, so I forced myself to focus and picked an outcropping on which to land. I would need to contemplate what Riordan meant by his comments later.

I was sure to bend my knees and cushion the impact of our landing for the witch so she was not jarred by it.

“Well, this is… certainly private,” she noted ironically as I dropped her legs so she was standing on her own feet. She inched away from me just enough to peer over the cliff at the tops of the trees far below, but she kept a hand clenched in my shirt as if to anchor herself.

“Are you frightened?” I asked her, unable to help but grip her arm as if she might slip over the edge.

“Am I totally naive not to be?” she returned evenly, turning to look up at me with those solemn, amber eyes that pinned me in place. With the sun setting behind her, Amira’s face was cast in shadow with a halo of sunlight gleaming off her hair and igniting strands of auburn.

Beautiful…

“No,” I answered quietly, and she gave a small smile.

“Good,” she declared before she turned to walk over to a boulder behind me. She leaned against it and patted the space right next to her in an invitation which I accepted. Carefully maneuvering my wing behind her so as not to knock her off the rock.

“So why me?” she asked as I reclined next to her.

“What do you mean?”

“You are closer to Riordan. Why am I here when you could probably be talking to him?” she wanted to know.

It was a good question, and one I had contemplated for a long time. I knew before her arrival that my reasoning for keeping my past from Riordan was based in shame. He was a prince and an Imítheos who would probably never truly understand, and I feared ruining his perception of my people whom he considered so noble and good.

Ruining his perception of me as those things. Because while I might know I was unworthy of him, the idea of him knowing it too felt unbearable.

But now, with Amira, it was like the shadows of my past were clambering to get out of me. Like she had set fire to all the holes in which they hid inside me and now they were scattering around like rats on a sinking ship.

Why?

“Because you… won.”

“Won?” she repeated in confusion, cocking her head in the corner of my eye.

“You know how it feels to be… at war with yourself,” I reminded her, and I saw her mouth open as she realized my reasoning before she turned her head forward again.

“And you want to know how I did it?” she guessed.

“ Yes ,” I admitted, glancing at her nervously to see how she felt about this private hope of mine.

I watched as she let out a long breath and reclined harder on the stone, crossing her arms and tilting her head as she appeared to consider what to tell me.

“Honestly? It’s an ongoing battle, but I do think that it starts with learning to be kinder and more accountable to yourself for how you’re feeling. I’m no therapist, Orion, but as corny as it sounds, it is actually the hardest thing… Just checking in with yourself when the… nasty thoughts try to weasel their way in again.”

I nodded because I already knew that was true.

“What is a therapist?” I asked, and she snorted a laugh.

“We all need a therapist. Basically, it is a person who is specifically trained to talk to people about this stuff.”

“It was a job in your world?” I verified.

“Yes! Although not enough people see them, and they are horribly underfunded.”

I was quiet for a moment as I pondered the notion that there were even enough people out there who might feel similarly to me that it necessitated the need for someone who was specially equipped to help them. And the idea that if such a person had existed… then I might not have suffered as horribly as I had for so fucking long…

“Perhaps we need them here,” I pointed out, and I saw Amira whip her head toward me as if in astonishment.

“You know… you might be right,” she mused.

We were quiet for a moment while she undoubtedly pondered the logistics of this suggestion, and I absorbed her presence contentedly while watching the sun set.

“Will you tell me… What was your poison?”

“My poison?” I repeated in confusion.

“My mother was my poison,” Amira tried to explain. “She is the thing in my head that infects everything.”

“Ah,” I grunted in understanding and turned my face away from her. “There are many… poisons.”

Amira nodded, and then she sat quietly for many long moments while I tried to work up the courage to unburden a little of my soul to her.

“I had a brother. Theon,” I told her finally.

“I didn’t know that,” she prompted me gently.

“I don’t really talk about him. And I should because he is the only reason there’s even a fucking shred of decency in me, but it is… painful,” I admitted with difficulty.

Amira remained silent next to me, allowing me time to decide what to tell her.

“He was older than me by about ten years. We shared a worthless mother but different fathers. His sounded like he was a decent man, but he died when Theon was a baby. Mine was just… mean. Theon managed to shield me from it most of the time. He took the beatings when my father was drunk and rampaging. And he was the one who went out to steal food so we didn’t starve whenever my parents were too high or drunk to go to work.”

“He sounds… like an incredible big brother.”

“He was,” I assured her, and I heard her inhale deeply as she prepared to ask the question I was dreading.

“What… happened to him?”

The words were on the tip of my tongue, but it did not feel like I could speak them aloud without succumbing to the terrible anguish of them.

“We used to sit up on the city wall and stare across the lake at the lights of Ergastiri,” I continued, knowing she’d understand I wasn’t ready to talk about what happened to my brother. “He was old enough to go to the school and escape if he wanted but… he wouldn’t leave me alone. And I was too terrified to make him go. He said we would go together, even if it meant that he was too old for them to train anymore. He would sweep the floors if he had to so he could watch over me becoming a warrior. We spent most of our nights like that just… talking about what life would be like when we got out of the Rookery.”

I hesitated to take a deep, calming breath.

“Theon was… good . Right down to his bones,” I told her as angry tears began to burn in my eyes. “He was the only good thing that ever came out of that fucking place, and he deserved so much better.”

“Orion…” she breathed in protest and almost reached for my hand before hesitating a moment in uncertainty. Then she seemed to decide to press through her doubt and continued to reach for me. She was careful to avoid my mangled knuckles as she pushed her fingers under my fist that was clenched tightly on my thigh, gently prying my fingers apart until she could thread hers up through them. And I let her. I was unable to look away from the sight of her small hand gripping mine so tightly.

“My brother frequently had to go collect our mother’s unconscious body from work, but I guess… he got old enough that her colleagues actually took notice of him. They put it in her head that he could be earning a lot of money if he would come to work with her. I remember her chasing him through the house yelling at him about it. I remember… her looking at me and then asking him if he was really willing to let me starve.”

Amira made a sharp hiss of disgust, but she did not voice the questions I was sure she must have about my mother’s work.

“So… that was the end of our nights on the city wall. Obviously, I was far too young to understand then, but I put it all together years later. All I knew at the time was how angry I was that he was going out at night and would not let me come with him. He would hide me under his bed to sleep just in case my father came home before him. And he would come back in the morning smelling of wine and smoke with this… dead look in his eyes.”

A look that I would become very familiar with in my own eyes whenever I looked into a mirror years later.

Amira brushed her thumb over mine, drawing me out of the memory, but I could not look down at her.

“Your mother was a…”

“Whore. You can say it, Amira,” I snorted in forced amusement when she was unable to even utter the word.

“For the record, I don’t think there is anything wrong with the profession if it is… consensual and safe.”

“I have rarely ever found it to be either of those things, but perhaps,” I muttered.

I could feel her staring up at me, and I was sure that she suspected the truth, but she did not push me for it.

“My father… would always take any money that any of us managed to make or steal and gamble with it in the hopes that he could… get lucky some night. Theon did manage to keep enough of it away from him to feed us, since my mother tended to spend her money on herself. But we knew to stay the fuck out of the house whenever my father would come home. He would always go out and lose everything, and then come back to beat the piss out of any of us that he could get his hands on.”

“Orion… Fuck ,” she muttered and shook her head as she squeezed my hand again.

“Theon took most of the beatings. I only got a couple. Mostly just a quick slap or a shove when my brother was not quick enough to get between us. But I saw him raw and bleeding more times than I could count,” I admitted.

We were getting closer to that night, and she seemed to know it because she was silent as she waited for me to get up the nerve.

“Theon figured out that he really could make a lot of money at the brothel, since he was not dependent on drugs or wine like our mother was. He gave enough to my father to keep him placated, but he started to hide a bunch of it too. I didn’t know until he had enough to start renting our own apartment. He got us out of that house, and we had a few of the most incredible weeks of my life out on our own. There was plenty of food. He even brought candy home sometimes. We each had a bed, and there was no yelling or fighting or… strangers staying the night.”

“He really took care of you,” she breathed, but I could already hear the emotion in her voice because she knew what was coming next… It was inevitable.

“My father came looking for us. He was angry that Theon had kept so much money from him, and he didn’t like that the only person bringing home food was gone. He tried to follow my brother home from work, but Theon always managed to lose him. I think he might have even tried paying him to just leave us alone. But… one night my father managed to figure out where we were living.”

I could still remember the sheer terror that seized me when we heard my father screaming and pounding on our apartment door. I remembered looking at Theon who did not hesitate to carry me to the table between our tiny cots. The only piece of furniture in the apartment with enough space under it for me to hide.

Do not move, do you hear me? Not a muscle!

The last words he ever spoke to me…

“He was only sixteen. Strong but nowhere near strong enough to fend off a full-grown man,” I whispered.

“You saw it?” she guessed.

“I saw it. And there is not a day that goes by that I do not wish I had just… done something. Anything .”

Amira breathed in through her nostrils and brushed her thumb over mine again. “He would have killed you too.”

“Maybe.” And maybe that would have been okay.

She seemed to know my thoughts because she turned to face me more directly on the stone we were sitting on. “Please don’t think like that,” she beseeched gently.

“Why not? Because that would insult his memory?”

A little voice in the back of my head whispered that it was time to stop now before I said too much, but I could not seem to reel in my emotions.

“I feel so much pressure to do something worthwhile with his sacrifice,” I said, finally speaking aloud the truth that had weighed on my soul for centuries. “And it makes me fucking hate myself that I can resent him even a little for it after everything he did for me. How the fuck am I supposed to make anything of what he gave me when I feel like a… like a curse. To everyone around me. I cause nothing but pain and suffering. Like a disease.”

Relief and regret went to war inside me and began to burn a hole in me the second the words were out of my stupid mouth. I might have yanked my hand out of hers and put some space between us, but Amira seemed utterly unperturbed by the disclosure or my anger. She sat next to me in silence for a long moment while she processed my confession with her eyes on our entwined hands.

Waiting for her to speak was torturous.

“All this pain you carry must be so overwhelming that it would be impossible not to feel like it is… infecting the world around you,” she mused finally.

She raised her head, our eyes connecting like magnets fusing together, and I was unable to respond to her.

“What? Did you think I wouldn’t get it?” she guessed with a slight smile as if she were amused to have shocked me so thoroughly.

“You know that feeling?” I asked her breathlessly.

“The one where you cannot help feeling like you suck the air out of the room just by walking into it? I know it,” Amira assured me with another gentle smile.

It was as if she had obliterated all my thoughts, and all I could do was stare at her.

Eventually she lowered her eyes down to my knuckles, turning my mangled hand over to examine them while I continued to stare at her like a daft mute. Absorbing her every lash, freckle, and pore. The dimples in her cheeks. The strands of her hair drifting over her slender shoulders. The staccato of her pulse leaping faster in her neck the longer I spent staring down at her.

“Do you have to hit things to release the anger?”

“Yes,” I answered without removing my eyes from her. The moonlight gleamed on her fair skin, illuminating her, and it was so breathtakingly beautiful.

“And does it help you?”

“Temporarily.”

“I found that talking like this with someone else really helped me. Just having the chance to say it all out loud. Even if the person had no advice to give,” she admitted, and I realized we had somehow drifted closer when she shrugged and brushed my arm with her shoulder. I sensed there was more she wanted to say, so I waited the way she had done for me. “You know that Riordan was stuck in his animal form when I met him? I thought he was genuinely an animal. One that seemed to have some understanding of my emotions, but no capacity to judge me or ever tell anyone else. So I… unburdened myself with him.”

“You mean you told him everything?”

“Everything! Like… the things that you just do not tell other people. Things that you shouldn’t even say out loud,” she stressed with all seriousness, and I couldn’t help it when she raised those wide, earnest eyes to me. I laughed, and after getting even just a little of the twisted darkness off my chest, it felt… shockingly good.

“Yeah… But I guess it worked out for me in the end,” Amira pointed out. She smirked, but there was a wistful look in her eyes as if she were remembering the days she had spent with our king in her world.

“You really do… love him,” I noted tentatively.

“Of course, I do! Why do you think I am here in this place that does not particularly like me?”

Her words immediately brought to mind the way she looked standing behind that table in the Rookery with an immense line of people waiting to see her.

“This place needs you. More than you might realize.”

She was quiet for so long that I glanced up and found that I was now the one being stared at.

“It’s growing on me,” she admitted with a playful wink before she looked down at my knuckles again. I thought she might be doing that whenever she was feeling shy. Like she needed something else to focus on.

“Why did Helena react like that when I touched you?” she asked me suddenly, glancing up again. “She seemed to think that you would be really upset or something.”

I looked out at the city lights beneath us to avoid her eyes while I tried to decide how much to tell her. She had not yet balked at anything I told her, and there was part of me that wanted to take advantage of it. But I was also afraid to push too hard or too fast and risk losing her.

Although if she was not going to be able to handle the things I wanted to tell her, then I preferred to know sooner rather than later.

“Because the last woman who put her hands in my hair like that ended up being slammed through a table with my hands around her throat,” I admitted.

“Oh…” she breathed with wide eyes. “Is it just women that make you feel like that? Should I not be—”

She tried to untangle our hands, but I tightened my grip on her to prevent her from pulling away from me.

“Mostly women, but I do not tend to react well when anyone grabs me unexpectedly. Especially if it’s my hair. But you do not make me feel like that,” I blurted quickly when my stomach hollowed at the thought that she might not touch me anymore. “I don’t understand why that is, but I think… it is because there is nothing but genuine kindness in you,” I hurried to explain. I was still unable to even meet her eyes which I knew was definitely not helping me seem like a well-adjusted individual.

I was suddenly on the verge of yet another nervous breakdown, worried that I had said too much, or too little, and not sure how to fix it…

Then she brushed her thumb soothingly over mine. Just the simplest and most unassuming of touches, but it calmed me instantly.

She was quiet for so long that I almost raised my eyes to check on her, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it.

“You went to work with your mom too, didn’t you?”

My pulse leapt, fluttering in my veins painfully before I finally nodded wordlessly.

“Oh, Orion,” she breathed my name before tilting her head against my shoulder.

“I really did not have any choice,” I defended myself, even though there was not even an ounce of accusation or judgement in her demeanor.

“I know you didn’t, but it would not matter even if you had made the choice for yourself and it left scars on you,” she reassured me.

I was quiet for a moment as I internalized her words.

“My mother chose it. I never had pity for her.”

“No. And why would you when she forced it on you and your brother?” she demanded rhetorically.

“It left her with scars.”

“Then she should have kept you as far away from it as she could!” Amira insisted angrily, finally lifting her head off my shoulder, but I still could not look down at her.

My eyes were glued to the leather guards on my arms which I had not removed in front of anyone in years.

“What if I were…”

I stopped, unsure if I could unleash this truth yet, but then she gave my hand a squeeze of encouragement.

“When you are sold to the brothel as a child who does not yet work for their keep, you do not leave until you pay back your indenture with interest,” I began tentatively, and I felt her instantly stiffen.

I could not force the words out of my mouth, so I tilted our hands so that I could reach the laces of the guard on my arm that she was holding onto. I felt her watching my fingers loosen all the strings with quick and efficient tugs until I’d exposed what was hidden underneath.

My inner forearm was scarred by blade and fire from all my desperate attempts to remove the magic brand that appeared right in the middle. Perfectly untouched despite the state of the rest of my arm and the state of my soul because of it. Such a seemingly innocuous marking with a binding rune and the signature symbol of my Madame’s establishment entwined. It gave off a faint glow from the magic coursing in it from the bespelled iron my Madame used to brand me as a child. That iron was her most cherished possession, made by a wildr hag to settle a debt, and she kept it on her person at all times.

Well. Almost at all times…

I could still hear the solid clunk of it being set down so decisively on my bedside table late in the night.

Just looking at her signature upon me still marking me as her property made me want to vomit. And the gods knew that if I had not absolutely needed my hands to stay at Ergastiri, then I might have cut both arms off at the elbows rather than see that signature on my skin.

I had no idea if Amira was familiar with the branding of whores in her world, but she seemed to understand the significance. Or perhaps the evidence of all my attempts to remove the mark was more telling for her…

“Why has Riordan not yet had this removed for you?” Amira demanded. She was so outraged by this discovery that I was startled by the force of her reaction.

“Because he doesn’t know. And I do not want him to,” I added sternly, causing her infuriated gaze to collide with mine in confusion. I could tell that she wanted to argue with me about it, but she seemed to decide against that before her gaze drifted back down to my arm again.

“It is alright,” she told me instead. “We’ll figure it out. Personally, I think you need to tell Riordan so he can put a stop to this kind of thing but… if that is not an option for you yet, then we’ll figure it out for now,” she swore.

I could not answer as she brushed her thumb carefully over the raised skin of the brand. Fire magic gleamed faint and red and warm beneath the soft pad of her finger as she seemed to examine the brand’s magical signature.

But all I could focus on was how she touched that vile mark as if she were not as disgusted as she should be.

“So is there any other way to remove it or would we have to pay the cost of the indenture? I would much rather stick an iron down the throat of whoever did this to you than give them any money. But if it’s the only way to get this off you…” She trailed off with a grimace.

“The price will be astronomical now from the interest accumulating all these years. And with so many far more important things going on right now, this isn’t a priority!” I attempted to remind her.

“Of course, it is a priority!” she objected.

“Because it is offensive to you,” I assumed.

“No! Because it clearly causes you pain!” she insisted, and this time, her thumb trailed over my scarred skin.

I could not seem to process how she could touch the most shameful part of me so easily, without an ounce of hesitation, and I wasn’t sure why but it made me feel…

Frantic with confusion .

“Why are you not offended?” I demanded, voice rising in spite of my best attempts not to let my temper get the better of me again. “This should disgust you!”

“I am disgusted by it!” she reassured, her own voice rising in her confusion with my defensiveness. “I just do not understand how anyone could hurt you like this—”

“No, I mean how can you bear to touch it?”

She looked startled and then glanced down at my arm as if she did not see what was so disgusting about it.

“Do you not want me to touch you?” she guessed as she removed her hand from both my arms completely.

And the absence of her touch, withdrawn in an attempt to make me feel more comfortable, only made me even more frantic and confused. I had to resist the childish urge to grab her again and replace her hands on me. And the uncertainty of not knowing whether I wanted her to touch me or not to touch me was overwhelming .

“No, it’s not… I never… No one… Fuck ,” I snarled, unable to get out more than a couple of words from one train of thought before my mind would scatter.

“Orion.” She spoke my name with an authority that was grounding. “This does not make you disgusting.”

“But of course, it does! Do you not realize what these marks mean about who and what I am?”

“I know what the brand means about your past , and I know what the scars mean about how you must feel about all of it. But I fail to see how this somehow is the only thing that gets to define who you are!”

I glowered at her, but those amber eyes stared right back at me in equal defiance. And then she did something that made my brain empty of all logical thought again…

Amira lifted my arm and placed a deliberate kiss on that vile brand. And then she scattered several more kisses on the rough skin around it that was marred by scars from all my self-mutilation. My anguish and self-hatred…

I could not breathe as I watched her press those warm, soft lips against the ugliest part of me without hesitation. Proving her point that she did not perceive the brand or my scars to be shameful or vile.

That… I was not reprehensible or offensive to her.

She straightened next to me, and I could tell she was about to say something, but I was moving before I’d even realized what I was about to do. Before I could think.

My fingers slid into her hair above her messy braid and knotted there to hold her in place as I leaned down so my lips crashed against hers.

I froze again almost immediately and braced for her to scream or push me away. To call me a filthy whore and demand to know why I thought I could touch her.

But she didn’t do any of that...

She sucked in a gasp against my mouth that was filled with the shock of something feeling unexpectedly good. And she did not move back when I stopped. I even felt her lift her face so our mouths brushed together again.

I had not kissed a woman in centuries, and it had never been something I ever wanted to do, but I did remember how their anticipation felt. And even if her body language had not given her away, her scent certainty did.

She wanted me to kiss her.

That was all I needed to know. The screech of thoughts and the thrum of anxiety was immediately overpowered by the sheer elation that she wanted me to kiss her …

The sound she uttered when my mouth opened against hers again tightened my abdomen instantly with arousal. The sensation of her melting into me and eagerly meeting every stroke of my lips and tongue was euphoric.

But before we could get heated, she gave a reluctant groan and turned her head to break our contact without moving away from me.

“W-wait, please,” she panted, although I could hear the hesitation hitching in her voice.

“You want me to stop?” I verified, because it certainly did not sound, feel, or smell like it to me.

“I… No . But I am worried that you might be feeling something that you cannot express with words.”

Yes . The staggering elation of someone being shown all my ugliness, and she had not been repulsed by me. Although I supposed I could see her point that this might not be the best of reasons to impulsively kiss her for the first time. She deserved better than that.

But my elation at not being perceived as repulsive was not the only reason I kissed her. If I were honest with her, I’d wanted to taste her well before, and my emotions had merely been heightened enough by her demonstration that I had acted without any of my usual fear or shame.

I wanted to kiss her. I still wanted to kiss her.

“It’s okay,” she assured me when she felt me hesitate, uncertain of what to say. “I just want you to be alright.”

“I am alright,” I answered softly, and for the first time in a very long time, it felt like it could be the truth.