6. Caroline
CAROLINE
The scream rips me out of sleep.
I jolt upright in the bed, heart slamming against my sternum. At first, I have absolutely no idea where I am. Dark room. Unfamiliar ceiling. The smell of woodsmoke and pine and cold, cold, cold.
Then it comes again: a raw, guttural sound from beyond the bedroom door, not quite a word and not quite not one. It's the kind of noise that lives in the basement of a person's throat, dredged up from somewhere primal and terrible.
It doesn't sound like Afon.
It sounds like an animal being hurt.
Wolf is already on his feet, whining, his nails skittering against the floorboards as he noses at the gap beneath the door.
"Afon?" I call out, but my voice comes out sleep-thick and useless. I throw the quilt off and swing my legs over the side of the bed. The floor is ice against my bare feet. "Afon!"
No answer. Just another groan. It's lower this time, more strangled, like he's choking on something.
My brain, helpful organ that it is, immediately presents me with every worst-case scenario. Intruder. Heart attack. Stroke. Bear.
Bear?!
I lurch off the bed and half-run toward the door, my sprained ankle be damned, because Afon Satyrin might be a grumpy, promise-breaking hermit who picks people up and puts them on counters without their consent like a living Elf on the Shelf, but he's also the only person within a fifteen-mile radius who knows how to keep me alive, and I'm not about to let him die on me before he tells me what I came here to—
Oh, shit.
My left foot catches the leg of the dresser.
The ankle—the same stupid, already-swollen ankle that got me into this mess—buckles sideways at an angle that ankles were never meant to achieve.
A white-hot bolt of pain rockets up my leg and detonates somewhere behind my kneecap.
I go down hard, my shin cracking against the floor, and I hear myself yelp like I'm now the animal under duress.
Wolf barks.
And from the other room, the sounds stop.
There's a beat of silence. Then the heavy, disoriented thud of someone lurching to their feet.
"… Caroline?"
His voice is hoarse and wrecked. Like someone dragged it across gravel.
"In here," I manage from my position on the floor, which can best be described as "crumpled." My ankle is throbbing with its own separate heartbeat, faster than mine, angrier than mine. I'm cradling it with both hands and trying not to cry. "I'm fine. I just, I heard you, and I thought—"
The bedroom door bangs open. Afon fills the frame, backlit by the dim orange glow of dying embers from the fireplace. He's in a T-shirt and the same black jeans he's worn every day since I arrived, and his chest is heaving like he just ran a sprint. His eyes are wild.
"What happened?"
"I fell. Again." I gesture weakly at the dresser. "Your furniture attacked me. It must have been friends with the tree root."
He strides over and kneels in front of me. The shift from disoriented nightmare beast to clinical is so fast it gives me whiplash.
"Ow. Ow. Ow!" I protest when he cups my damaged appendage.
"Stop squirming."
"Stop hurting me!"
He ignores that and rotates my foot a few degrees. I hiss through my teeth. His thumb finds the bone on the outside of my ankle—the same spot he checked the first night—and presses.
I grab his wrist. "If you do that one more time, I swear to God—"
"It's not broken," he interrupts. "But you've made it worse."
"Yeah, no kidding. I figured that out when my entire leg caught fire."
He exhales through his nose. In the faint light, I can see a sheen of sweat on his forehead and the rapid pulse in his throat, right where the star tattoo sits.
Whatever he was dreaming about, he hasn't fully come down from it.
His hands are steady on my ankle, but the rest of him is vibrating at some panicked frequency I can almost feel.
"Can you stand?" he asks.
"Probably not."
"Hm."
And then—because this is just what Afon does now, what he defaults to whenever I become horizontally inconvenient—he scoops me off the floor.
This time, I don't fight it. Partly because my ankle genuinely feels like it's been visited by a medieval torture device, and partly because it's something like 2 A.M. and I'm too tired to be outraged.
But mostly because his arms, when they close around me, are shaking. Ever so slightly. A fine tremor running through the muscles of his forearms and shoulders, so faint that I'd miss it if I weren't pressed against his chest.
It's almost like he needs this as much as I do.
Which begs the question:
Who exactly does he think he's saving?
He carries me to the bed and lowers me down carefully. He arranges the spare pillow under my ankle, pulls the quilt over me, and straightens up.
"Stay off it," he orders.
"Afon. Afon, wait."
He stops in the doorway. His back is to me, one hand braced on the doorframe. I can see the tension in his shoulder blades through the thin cotton of his shirt. The muscles are bunched up around his spine like they're bracing for impact.
"You were screaming," I say.
He sighs. "Go back to sleep, Caroline."
"I can't sleep now! You scared the hell out of me. I thought there was a bear in the cabin. I thought you were being murdered."
"Well," he says to the doorframe, "there wasn't. And I wasn't."
"Could've fooled me."
He drops his hand from the frame and turns around. The firelight catches the planes of his face—the crooked nose, the deep-set eyes still glazed with something he's trying to blink away. He looks exhausted.
"It was a dream," is all he says. "It's done now."
"Okay. That's fine. But you don't have to go back out there to greet it again."
His brow furrows. "What do you want me to do?"
I scoot over toward the wall and pat the empty side of the bed. "Sit. Just for a minute. Watch out for Wolf, though."
As if on cue, Wolf lets out a satisfied whimper from his post at the foot of the bed, sprawled across the only viable standing room like a furry area rug.
Afon looks at the dog, then at the bed, then at me.
"I don't bite," I add. "Unlike some people's Rottweilers."
He wavers for another second, and then—miraculously, improbably—he sits.
I hold my breath as he lowers himself onto the very edge of the mattress, back straight, feet flat on the floor, hands on his knees. It's like he's ready to bolt at the first sign of emotional vulnerability.
The bed dips under his weight. We sit there in the semi-dark, breathing in sync as we recalibrate back to this plane of existence.
"My mom used to have nightmares," I say after a moment.
"After my dad started working late all the time—which I now understand was not actually 'work' in the traditional sense—she'd wake up screaming.
Not every night, but enough that I learned to sleep through it.
Isn't that horrible? I was, like, fourteen, and I'd hear her crying through the wall and I'd just roll over.
Put my pillow over my head. Teenagers are the worst."
I feel a choking sob climb up my throat. I press my lips together and will it back down into the pit of my chest.
"She always pretended it didn't happen in the morning," I continue.
"She'd make these elaborate breakfasts—crepes, frittatas, the full Julia Child experience—and she'd be so bright and chipper that it felt rude to mention I'd heard her sobbing all night long.
So I never did. And then she was dead, and I couldn't mention it even if I wanted to. "
Afon is very still beside me.
"I think about that a lot," I admit, mostly to the ceiling. "All the things I didn't say when I had the chance. All the mornings I sat there eating crepes and pretending everything was fine because it was easier than asking what was wrong."
Silence.
"Anyway," I say, brushing a rogue tear off my cheek, "that's my tragic backstory. Or part of it. The rest involves cryptic letters and a man who won't tell me about my own father."
He lets out a breath. Not a sigh, exactly. More like the sound of pressure being released from a valve.
"Your mother," he says slowly, "was afraid for your father."
I turn my head to look at him. His profile is granite in the low light. "You knew her well?"
"Well enough."
"Well enough to know what she was afraid of?"
He rubs the band on his ring finger. That unconscious tic—thumb circling bronze—over and over, like a rosary in the hands of a man who no longer believes in God but can't quite kick the habit.
"Your mother was smarter than your father in some ways," he says. "She saw things coming before he did. She understood the cost of the choices he made, even if she couldn't stop him from making them."
My throat tightens. "What choices?"
He shakes his head. "Not tonight."
Every cell in my body wants to push. But there's something in his voice that makes me pull back. Uncharacteristic from me, I know.
The wind picks up outside, rattling the window in its frame, and Wolf twitches through another dream. I listen to Afon breathe. His breathing has slowed since he sat down. The tremor in his hands has stopped, or at least I can't feel it through the mattress anymore.
"Afon?"
"Mm."
"What were you dreaming about?"
He doesn't answer for so long that I think he's fallen asleep sitting up, which would honestly be impressive and also deeply on-brand for him.
"Was it Yelena?" I venture.
I know the instant I say it that I was wrong to go there. He lurches to his feet, and Wolf wakes with a confused whine.
"How do you know that name?" His voice is perfectly level, which is a million times worse than if he'd shouted.
Oh, Caroline. You absolute moron.
"I… There was a photograph. On the nightstand. I saw it last night, and the names on the back—"
"You went through my things."
"It was poking out! I didn't go rummaging through your drawers or anything, it was just there, and I—"
He takes a step back from the bed. Then another.
The distance between us opens like a crack in ice, and I can feel the temperature in the room plummet with it.
His face has closed off completely. Whatever door had cracked open in the last ten minutes—the shared darkness, the quiet, my mother's nightmares and his—has slammed shut with the kind of finality that makes me understand it was never really open to begin with.
"Afon, I'm sorry. I shouldn't have looked—"
"No. You shouldn't have."
"—but I didn't mean to pry, I just—"
"Go to sleep, Caroline."
He steps over Wolf, passes through the doorway, and pulls the door shut behind him with an angry thud.
Then another door opens—the front door. The thump of Afon's boots, the screech of blisteringly cold air, the rustle of his flannel. Then it slams shut again, and I'm left alone in the silence.
Is midnight in the snow really better than talking about Yelena with me? I guess so. Wolf lifts his head and looks at me with an expression that I would swear, on my parents' graves, is disappointment.
"I know," I whisper. "I'm an idiot. I know."
I pull the quilt up to my chin and lie there in the dark, ankle throbbing, heart throbbing harder, and listen for the sound of him coming back.
He doesn't.
Not for a long, long time.