Chapter 6
Chapter Six
Iwoke with the wolf’s mouth still behind my eyes.
My body jerked before my mind caught up, hands clawing at whatever was beneath me, legs kicking, a scream building in my throat that came out as a broken rasp. My heart slammed against my ribs and I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think, couldn’t see anything but teeth and liquid gold eyes and darkness.
Then the warmth reached me.
It pressed down on me, sinking into my bones, chasing away a cold that had settled so deep I thought I’d never feel anything else. I was lying on something soft. Heavy furs, smelling of animal musk and wood smoke. A fire crackled somewhere close, the heat of it on my face.
My breathing slowed. I opened my eyes.
A ceiling made of rough-hewn logs stared back at me, dark with age and smoke stains that had built up over decades. Beams crossed overhead, and bundles of dried herbs hung from the rafters, swaying slightly though there was no breeze to move them.
The smell hit me before the memory did. Yarrow and sage and something bitter underneath. I knew it. I knew it the way your body knows things your mind has let go of, from somewhere deep, from childhood, from visits so long ago I’d almost forgotten them.
This was my grandmother’s cottage. The one deep in the forest, the one I’d searched for after she died and never found. The forest had swallowed it whole. Yet here I was.
I sat up slowly. The room tilted and I waited for it to steady. The furs slid to my waist. I was bare underneath. Bruised and scraped and covered in dried blood, but bare. My shift was gone. Someone had undressed me.
Panic clawed up my throat. I grabbed the largest fur and wrapped it around myself, tucking the edge tight under my arm. My legs shook when I stood. The stone floor was cold under my bare feet and the room swayed, but I stayed upright.
The cottage was small, just like I remembered, stone hearth where a fire burned steady, rough wooden table with two chairs, shelves lined with jars and bottles.
A door on the far wall led to the back room.
I remembered it dimly, grandmother’s workroom, where she kept her medicines and the things she didn’t want small hands reaching for.
The bed sat against the right wall near the entrance, close enough to the hearth that the fire’s warmth reached it.
But things had changed. The windows, two of them, one on each side of the door, were covered with heavy wooden boards nailed into the frames.
Grandmother had never boarded her windows.
She’d hung linen curtains that let the morning light through and kept the moths out at night.
These boards were thick, the wood still pale where it hadn’t yet darkened with age.
And the door. An iron bar sat in heavy brackets on the inside, long enough to span the frame and bolted to slide across.
Grandmother’s cottage had never had a bar.
She’d had a latch, a simple wooden thing that clicked when you pushed it.
This was something else entirely. Someone had turned this place into something it was never meant to be.
My red cloak hung over a wooden rack near the fire, still damp and steaming slightly. Someone had brushed the mud from it and hung it with care. Relief cut through the panic — stupid, it was just a cloak, just fabric. But it was mine. The only thing I had left from before.
Then I heard it — iron scraping against wood on the other side of the door. A bar lifting out of brackets. There was one on the outside too.
The door opened.
I spun toward the sound, one hand holding the fur tight against my chest.
A man stood in the doorway, tall, well over six feet and filling the frame completely.
His shoulders were broad enough to block out the morning light behind him, built like he’d spent years splitting wood and hauling stone, muscle straining against a worn shirt that had been mended too many times to count.
His hair was dark and curling, gone silver at the temples, and his beard was the same, full and close-cropped, gray threading up through it from the jaw like frost. Heavy brows pulled low over amber eyes that burned like embers but gave away nothing, and his face was weathered the way stone weathers, lines carved deep around his mouth and at the corners of his eyes, a thin white scar cutting through his left brow and a longer one running temple to chin beneath the beard.
He stood there looking at me the way men look at problems they haven’t yet decided how to solve. “You’re awake.” The sound scraped out of him like gravel dragged over stone.
“Who are you?” I stepped back on instinct, wanting distance between us.
“The man who kept you from dying.” He stepped inside and I stepped back again, clutching the furs to my chest. My shoulders hit the wall and there was nowhere left to go. “You collapsed in the forest. You’ve been unconscious for hours.”
Hours. The cellar, the grate, the rain, the running — it came back in pieces, each one sharper than the last. And then the wolf.
“The black wolf.” My throat was raw, and I had to force the rest. “It was standing over me. Close enough that I could ...” I swallowed. Tried again. “I could see inside its mouth.”
He watched me from the doorway, his expression giving away less than the stone wall behind me.
“Where did it go?” I asked.
“Away.” He offered nothing else.
“Wolves that size don’t just walk away from a woman lying in the mud.”
“That one did.” He crossed to the hearth and crouched by the fire like the conversation was settled.
It wasn’t. A wolf that had sent Klaus’s dogs screaming into the night, a wolf built like a nightmare given fur and teeth, didn’t stand over its prey and then leave.
A force had driven it off. Or a command had called it off.
I filed the question away and asked the one that mattered more right now.
“Where are my clothes?” I pulled the furs higher.
“Your shift was torn to pieces and soaked through. I threw it away. As for the cloak, it’s drying over there.” He gestured toward the hearth without looking away from my face. “I removed your clothes so you wouldn’t freeze to death.”
“You undressed me.” My teeth clenched.
“You were hardly breathing.” His expressions held no apology. “Would you rather I had let you die for the sake of your modesty?”
“I’d rather you’d kept your hands to yourself.” I glared at him.
He crossed to a chest in the corner without answering, lifted the lid and reached inside, then pulled out a bundle of fabric. When he shook it out I saw a worn shift and a heavy skirt that had been patched and mended so many times the original fabric was hardly visible beneath all the repairs.
“These were left here.” He held them out, his arm steady. “They should fit.”
I recognized them immediately. The shift had a small tear near the hem mended with blue thread. I remembered watching Grandmother make those stitches when I was a child, sitting at her feet while she worked by candlelight. The skirt was the one she’d worn for heavy work, for gardening and foraging.
“Those were my grandmother’s.” I swallowed hard around the words.
“Then they’re yours now.” He kept his arm extended, his face showing nothing.
I crossed the room and snatched the bundle from his hands, then retreated to the far side near the fire where the warmth could reach me. “Turn around.”
He turned without argument and faced the door.
I dressed as fast as my injured body would let me. The cloth smelled of cedar and age and the herbs Grandmother used to keep moths away, lavender and rosemary tucked into the folds. It smelled like her, and for a moment I couldn’t breathe past the knot in my throat.
“This is her cottage.” I pulled the skirt up over my hips. “My grandmother’s.”
“Yes.” His back stayed to me, broad against the doorframe.
“How long have you been living here?” I questioned.
“I think twenty-two years,” he admitted without a trace of apology.
Twenty-two years. He’d been squatting in my grandmother’s home for twenty-two years!
“You can turn around.” I pulled the blanket tighter around my shoulders.
He turned. His eyes swept over me once, then settled on my face. Cold ran down my spine. He seemed familiar.
“Who are you?” I asked.
“Dietrich.” And nothing else.
It should have been enough. It wasn’t. Dietrich. The name turned over in my head, catching on something I couldn’t quite reach. Dietrich. I looked at his face again, the shape of his brow, the set of his shoulders, those eyes I was so sure I had seen before.
And then I remembered. A boy trailing behind his father at the village market. Dark hair, warm eyes, quiet as a shadow. I’d only seen him twice — once at the market, once at the edge of the forest, standing beside his father like he’d grown out of the trees. Erik’s son.
Erik. Erik had a son.
“You’re Erik’s son.” The words left me before I could stop myself.
His nostrils flared, his whole body going still.
“Your father and my aunt.” I held the sentence together by force. “Sophia.”
“What about her?” He folded his arms across his chest, the muscles in his forearms tightening.
“Klaus told me she ran away with him. But I remember her around your father.” I kept my eyes on his face. “She was afraid of him. She’d go quiet whenever he was near. Her hands would shake. That’s not a woman who runs away with a man. That’s a woman who was taken.”
A muscle jumped in his cheek.
“What did your father do to her?” I demanded, stepping closer.
He didn’t answer. Just stood there, his fingers digging into his own arms like he was holding himself together.
“Tell me,” I pressed.
“She went with him,” he bit out. “She chose to go.”
“She was nineteen. He was twice her age with a son just two years younger than she was.” I was shouting now and I couldn’t stop it.
“My grandmother set a place for her at the table every single night for two years. Two years, Dietrich. And then one morning she stopped. And a year after that she was dead.”