Chapter 10 JACE
JACE
The door closes and none of us move.
Not slammed. Pulled shut with the kind of control that costs more than slamming would.
Owen is the first to react. He takes half a step toward the hallway and Reid shifts, not speaking, just moving his weight to block the path. I'm ahead of them both.
"I'll go."
Owen turns. His face has gone careful, the openness from moments ago shut down so completely it might never have been there. "Maybe she needs space."
I look at him. He reads it and nods once. Reid doesn't move. Doesn't agree out loud. But he doesn't stop me.
I grab my coat off the hook.
Outside, the cold is a solid thing. I stand on the porch for a second and scan the tree line and there she is, already past the clearing, moving into the pines at a pace that isn't quite running, but close. Her coat is dark against the snow. Her head is down. She's not looking where she's going.
I follow.
I don't have a plan, and Owen might be right. The last thing she might want right now is one of us on her trail.
I pull my collar up and keep moving.
She's maybe three minutes ahead of me. The snow is still reading her prints clearly, each one punched clean into the crust, and the trail bends east into the older growth where the canopy cuts the wind and the light goes blue and quiet. I slow down when I hear her, before I see her.
She's in a small clearing where the trees open up enough to let sky through. Standing still. The vapor from her breathing is visible and too fast, short shallow pulls that aren't getting enough air. Her back is to me. Her shoulders are high and locked.
I stop at the edge of the clearing and watch.
She bends down. Picks up a stone. It fits the palm of her hand. She closes her fist around it and straightens, and her knuckles go white immediately, the tendons standing out across the back of her hand, and she squeezes. Hard.
I recognize what she's doing.
I was sixteen, standing behind a bodega in Queens with my knuckles split open after I smashed them against a brick wall, watching the blood well up .
Everything else was noise. At least the blood was something that was happening because of me, a thing I could see, a thing that made sense when nothing else did.
She's standing with her fist at her side and her eyes closed and she is somewhere else that isn't this clearing. Her jaw is set so tight I can see the muscles working from fifteen feet away. The rapid breathing hasn't slowed.
"Maya."
Nothing. The vapor keeps coming in those short white bursts.
"Maya." I keep my voice low and even. The voice you use for something hurt in the woods. No sudden movements. No pressure.
Still nothing. She's gone somewhere I can't reach with words.
I cross the clearing. The snow compresses under my boots and I know she can hear me coming but she doesn't turn, doesn't flinch, doesn't react at all. I stop behind her, close enough to feel the tension coming off her body like a frequency. I put my hand on the back of her neck.
Her whole body startles. A full-system jolt that runs through her shoulders and down her spine and into her legs. But I don't let go. My hand stays where it is. Firm. Present. The back of her neck is freezing under my palm, and I can feel her pulse under my fingers, rapid and hard.
I turn her gently until she's facing my chest and I pull her in. Her face against my jacket. My arms around her. I hold.
She's rigid. Every muscle locked. Her fists are between us, still closed, and she's shaking in a way that isn't from cold.
"Breathe with me," I say. I make my own breathing slow and deliberate and loud enough for her to hear it, loud enough for her to feel my chest rise and fall against her. Slow. Steady. "Come on. With me."
She resists. Her body fights the rhythm like giving in to something, even oxygen, is a concession she isn't willing to make.
Then I feel it shift. One shudder that runs through her whole frame. And her breathing starts to follow mine.
We stay that way. Her breathing slows. The rapid white clouds settle into a longer, quieter rhythm. I can feel her hands between us, still closed into fists. I don't reach for them yet. I keep my arms where they are and let her body do the work of deciding whether it's safe to come back.
Snow slides off a branch somewhere behind us and hits the ground with a soft concussion. My chin is resting on the top of her head.
After a while her stillness changes. The locked rigidity softens into something heavier. She's coming back.
I loosen my hold enough to look at her face.
The tears are already there. Running silently, tracking down her cheeks in clean lines, and her expression hasn't changed. Completely still. No sound. Just tears moving down her face like she doesn't know they're happening. Like her body is doing something her mind hasn't authorized.
I don't say anything. I bring both thumbs up and wipe them away, one side and then the other, my hands framing her jaw. Her skin is cold and damp under my fingers and her eyes are grey-green and wet and looking into mine.
I take her right hand in both of mine. It's still closed around the rock. Her knuckles are white at the ridges. I bring her fist to my chest and hold it there between us. Pressed against the front of my jacket. Against the heartbeat underneath.
I wait until she looks up at me.
"Let it go," I say.
She holds. I watch the tension in her fingers, the way the blood has left them entirely, and I don't pull or force. I wait. The snow falls between us in slow, scattered flakes.
Then, slowly, her hand opens.
The rock drops into the snow.
The sound it makes is small and clear and finished.
I look at her palm. The indentations are deep, the skin pressed white and pink in the shapes of the stone's edges. Near the base of her palm the skin has broken in two places, small and shallow, blood just beginning to surface in thin lines.
I bring her hand up and press my mouth against her palm.
My lips against the broken skin, against the marks the stone left, against the part of her that chose to hold on to something that hurt because at least the hurt was hers.
Her fingers curl slightly toward my face.
I feel them against my jaw, against the stubble there.
I pull her back in and hold her. She lets me. No resistance this time. She doesn't make a sound. She doesn't say anything. But her forehead drops against my chest and her fists uncurl and her hands flatten against my jacket, palms open, and she lets me take her weight.
Whatever happened to her, it left her like this. That's all I know. That's enough to know.
Snow begins to fall in earnest. Not the scattered flakes from before but something committed, the sky making good on the white promise it's been holding all morning. The flakes catch in her hair and on the shoulders of her coat and I can feel them landing on the back of my neck, cold and precise.
I press my lips to the top of her head. Her hair is damp with snow.
"Walk with me?"
I feel her nod against my chest. A small movement. Not much. Enough.
We move together out of the clearing and into the trees, settling into a slow pace. Our footsteps sound clean in the new snow, a rhythm that's almost companionable. She still hasn't spoken and that's all right. I'm not asking her to.
The trail narrows and I move a low-hanging branch out of her path. She ducks under my arm and keeps walking. The snow sifts through the canopy above us, catching the grey light on the way down.
After a while, I say, "I was sixteen when my mother died."
She doesn't respond. But I feel her stride shorten slightly, her pace pulling back half a step.
"She was driving," I say. "It was raining. She lost control of the car." I leave it there. The facts are the facts.
Maya stops walking. She turns to me, and her face is different now.
The blankness from the clearing is gone.
She raises her hand and places her palm flat against my chest, just above my sternum, and I can feel the pressure of it through my coat and my shirt and my skin, all the way down to the bone.
I look down at her hand. And then up at her face. And I hold her hand there with mine.
"I was angry for a long time," I say. "At her, which doesn't make any sense. At Owen, because after she died he went somewhere inside himself and I couldn't get to him." I pause. "At Reid, because he showed up and he was in charge and he didn't ask me whether I wanted that."
Her hand presses harder against my chest. Not pushing. Grounding.
"I didn't know what to do with any of it," I say.
We start walking again. Side by side. The trail is wider here and the trees are old enough that their branches form a canopy twenty feet above us, filtering the snow into a fine, scattered fall.
"When everything feels like it's coming apart," I say, watching the trail ahead, "and you can't get hold of any of it. You start looking for the one thing you can make happen yourself." I don't look at her. "Something you can feel. Even if that means physical pain."
The snow comes down a little heavier. The wind has dropped and the silence between the trees is the specific Montana silence that has weight and texture.
"I started fighting," I say. "Picked up with a crowd in the city where that was the currency. Didn't matter who. Didn't matter what about." I step over a root crossing the path and wait for her to step over it too.
"Got close to an arrest one night. Police officer who showed up turned out to be an old buddy of Reid's.
" I find a half-buried log crossing the trail, trunk slick with ice and snow, and I stop and turn and put my hands on her waist and help her step over it.
My hands fit against the shape of her under the coat, the narrowing above her hips, and she lets me lift her and set her down on the other side, and we keep walking.
"That was when Reid said enough. That we needed to get out.
Start fresh somewhere new. He brought us out here. "
I look up through the canopy. The snow is coming through the branches in diagonal lines, catching what's left of the light.
"I didn't want to come," I say. "I hated the idea of it. Leaving the city felt like losing her a second time. Everything she'd built for us was there. Our apartment. Our neighborhood. The bodega where she bought coffee every morning. I thought if I left I'd lose the last piece of her I had."
The trees thin ahead and I can see the shape of the cabin through the pines. The lit windows are warm and yellow against the grey light. Smoke from the chimney.
We both stop.
I turn to her. The snow is catching in her hair and on her eyelashes, and her eyes are focused entirely on my face with a quality of attention that I can feel on my skin, warm and specific, like standing in a narrow beam of light.
"I know what it feels like," I say, "to be furious and unable to do anything with it. To feel like nothing you do makes a difference. The feeling of not having control over the things that are hurting you."
She's looking at me. Her eyes are clear.
"But I also had people in my corner, willing to help," I say. "Even when I didn't want them."
The snow falls between us. The cabin waits at the end of the trail, warm and lit.
I extend my hand.
She looks at it. A long moment goes by. Cold air between us. Snow landing in her hair.
Then she takes my hand.
Her fingers are cold and small and the cuts on her palm press against mine. I close my hand around hers and turn toward the cabin and step forward.
For a half-second everything balances on this moment. Her weight on one side, the warmth ahead, and the silence holding it all.
Her fingers tighten around mine.
She follows.