Chapter 6 #2
Pain moved behind his eyes — just a flash, just a moment. Then he buried it.
“So stop telling me she chose to go,” I yelled. “I know she’s dead. What I want to know is what your father did to her before she died.”
He flinched. Just a bit and then he turned back to the fire like I hadn’t spoken.
“Don’t you turn away from me,” I snapped.
“She was a witch,” he shot back.
I’d asked him what his father did and he’d answered with what Sophia was, as if that explained it. As if that excused it.
He’d said it with so much certainty it baffled me. This wasn’t village whispers. This wasn’t Klaus with his suspicions and his leverage. Klaus had been guessing. This man wasn’t. He knew.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I managed, and even I could hear how thin it sounded.
He looked at me like I’d said something stupid.
“Your grandmother knew when to stop setting that plate because she saw her. Because your grandmother could see the dead.” He stepped closer.
“Sophia could walk into a crowded room and tell you who was lying before they’d finished the sentence.
You grow herbs no one else can keep alive.
You walk in your sleep. The whole village has been whispering ’witch’ for years.
” He threw my own voice back at me, high and mocking.
“’I don’t know what you’re talking about.
’” His lip curled. “You don’t hide it as well as you think you do. ”
There was no arguing with him. Every word was true and he knew it.
“How long have you been watching us?” I whispered.
“Very long time. Long enough to know everything there was to know about your family,” he said, but his tone hardened.
“Your kind, your family cost me everything. My father. My childhood. Over two decades alone in a dead woman’s cottage.
All because he couldn’t stay away from a girl with witch blood.
” His eyes held mine. “You’re not the first woman in your line to end up caged in this cottage, Talia. ”
“What do you mean, in this cottage?”
Suddenly his face closed off and he immediately turned back to the fire.
“Dietrich.” I uttered his name sharper this time.
His hands curled into fists at his sides. When he spoke, his tone was hollow. Bitter. So bitter it had hardened into something that sounded almost like indifference.
“The woman my father abandoned me for,” he ground out.
“Twice. He abandoned me twice — once when he took her, once when she died and he had nothing left and disappeared into the forest. Both times because of her.” He stared at the flames.
“He brought her here. Turned her mother’s cottage into her cage. ”
“She was here.” I heard myself say it before I could stop. The shock of knowing drove through me like a blade between my ribs. “She was here. What happened to her?”
“What do you think happened? He kept her. She fought. He fought harder. Eventually one of them had to break.” A pause. “She broke.”
The space behind my sternum folded in on itself. Understanding.
The boards. The bar. The brackets bolted deep into the frame. Erik hadn’t built those to keep the forest out. He’d built them to keep Sophia in.
Two hours away. In her own mother’s cottage.
And I’d been in the village believing a note while deep down in my heart I knew she would never abandon Grandma and me.
And I’d still done nothing. Because I was fourteen and powerless and my gift showed me horrors but never gave me the strength to stop them.
“I didn’t know.” I could barely push it out. “I didn’t know she was here.”
“If it helps you sleep better, Talia.” His mouth twisted. “Or shall I say. Little Red.”
Heat tore through me. That name. Sophia’s name for me. Coming out of his mouth like he owned it.
I slapped him across the face.
The crack echoed through the cottage. His head didn’t even move, of course it didn’t, he was a foot taller than me and built like a wall, but a red mark bloomed across his cheek, and his stare blazed down at me with something that was not quite fury.
My hand was still shaking. My eyes were burning.
Because the worst of it wasn’t that he blamed Sophia.
Wasn’t that he’d been watching my family for years.
It was that she was here and I’d never come looking.
I’d let the forest have the cottage and Sophia and everything my grandmother had left behind.
And now this man stood in her home knowing more about my family than I knew myself.
I had to leave. I had to get out of here. I turned toward the red cloak by the fire, but his hand caught my arm before I’d taken three steps. Not rough but immovable, like being grabbed by a tree root.
“You’re not leaving.” His grip didn’t tighten.
“Take your hand off me,” I hissed, wrenching sideways against his hold.
“The village wants you dead. Klaus won’t stop hunting until he finds you. And there’s a wolf out there somewhere. You have nowhere to go.”
“I’ll take my chances,” I shot back, yanking my arm. He didn’t budge.
“You’ll die out there,” he warned, his fingers still locked around my wrist.
“Better than being trapped in here with you,” I spat.
Pain crossed his face. There and buried before I could name it. But he didn’t let go. “You’re not leaving this cottage.” He said it quiet, final, like he was stating the weather. “Not today. Not tomorrow. Not until I decide it’s safe.”
“You can’t keep me here,” I snarled, twisting against his grip.
“I can.” He released my wrist and stepped back.
“And I will.” He crossed to the door, stepped outside, and closed it behind him.
A gust of air rushed in before the door shut, colder than the rain had been, sharp enough to sting my face.
The temperature was dropping fast. Iron scraped against wood.
The outside bar, dropping back into place.
I threw myself at the door and shoved. It didn’t move. “Let me out!” I pounded my fists against the wood. “You have no right! You don’t get to decide what happens to me!”
He didn’t reply. I just heard the wind in the trees, then footsteps crunching through the snow, steady and unhurried, fading into the forest. He wasn’t angry. He wasn’t conflicted. He’d already made the decision before he’d walked through the door.
I pressed my forehead against the wood, my breath coming hard and fast. The rage burned so hot I couldn’t think properly. But underneath it, there was something cold and familiar, the same helplessness I’d felt in Klaus’s cellar, the same locked door, the same man deciding my fate without asking.
I’d escaped one cage and walked straight into another.
I reached for the inside bar, the one I’d noticed when I first woke up, still sitting open in its brackets, and slid it across.
The thud of iron meeting wood went deeper than the sound.
He’d barred me in. Fine. But I could bar him out too.
A small thing. Petty, maybe. But it made me feel like I had some control.
The rage drained away slowly, leaving something hollow and aching in its place. I stood in the middle of the room and looked, really looked, at what was left of my grandmother’s life.
The shelves were the same. She’d built them herself, I remembered that now, hammered the brackets in crooked so the jars always slid to one side.
They still did. His jars lined the top rows, things I didn’t recognize, dark liquids and dried roots.
But on the bottom shelf, pushed to the back and half hidden behind a cracked pot, I found a row of clay jars with cork stoppers.
My grandmother’s hand had labeled each one in her careful, slanting script. Yarrow. Comfrey. Calendula. Sage.
I pulled the sage jar down and opened it.
The smell went through me. Dusty and sharp and so familiar my knees buckled.
I was small again, bare feet on the stone floor, watching my grandmother crush sage between her palms and drop it into the pot.
I couldn’t remember the words she’d said, just her hands and her warmth and the way this smell meant I was safe.
But Sophia had smelled this too.
The thought arrived like a knife between the ribs.
Sophia had been in this cottage. Had stood where I was standing, breathed the same air, looked at these same jars with their familiar labels in their mother’s handwriting.
Had she opened them? Had she pressed the sage to her nose the way I just had and smelled home and safety and the life she’d been stolen from?
Had it made it worse? Surrounded by her mother’s things, her mother’s herbs, her mother’s careful script on every jar, while the man who’d taken her decided when the door opened and when it stayed shut?
I set the jar down on the floor and looked around the room with different eyes.
The bed. Sophia had slept in that bed. Or hadn’t slept — had lain awake listening to the footsteps fading, the long terrible silence of a forest that had swallowed her whole.
Had she pressed her face into the pillow and tried to remember what freedom smelled like?
Had she pulled the furs to her chin and stared at the ceiling and wondered if anyone was coming for her?
I crawled across the room and ran my hands along the base of the door. I don’t know what I was looking for. Some trace of her. Some proof that the girl who’d braided my hair and called me Little Red had touched these same walls.
I found them. Low on the wood, near the bottom, where a woman on her knees would reach.
Thin lines scored into the grain, shallow, repetitive, just the desperate scratching of fingernails against oak.
Over and over and over. Hundreds of them, layered on top of each other until the wood was rough and furred with it.
My fingers traced the marks and the tears came.
I didn’t cry for my grandmother this time.
I cried for Sophia. For the girl who’d taught me the names of every herb on grandmother’s shelf and let me steal the ribbons from her hair.
For a nineteen-year-old who’d scratched at this door until her fingers bled and then scratched some more because stopping meant accepting and accepting meant dying and she wasn’t ready to die.
Until she was.
I sat on the floor with my back against the door and Sophia’s scratches under my palm and cried. For Sophia. For myself. Because I was behind the same door now, and the scratches under my fingers could have been mine.
Light came through the cracks in the boards, pale and gray. Somewhere outside, a wolf howled — one long note carrying more grief than any animal should.
I wiped my face and pulled the furs off the bed and made a nest by the fire, curled up on the floor with Sophia’s scratches at my back and the cloak tight around me.
Tomorrow I would figure out what to do. Right now, I needed to survive.