Chapter 8
Chapter Eight
Sophia wrote the note by candlelight.
Her hand moved slowly across the paper, the leftward tilt I’d know anywhere, the round letters, the careful spacing of someone choosing words she didn’t mean.
She paused twice. The quill hovered over the page and her lips pressed together and I could see the lie building behind her eyes, the shape of it forming before the ink touched paper.
I’ve gone with a man. Don’t come looking.
She set the quill down. Stared at the words. Her fingers were trembling.
The cottage was warm around her. Our village cottage, the one with the crooked shutters and the herb garden out back and the kitchen that always smelled like sage and bread.
The fire was low in the hearth. Dried lavender hung from the beam above the door.
The shelves were full, jars and bottles and bundles, grandmother’s careful labels facing out the way she liked them.
Grandmother was asleep in the big bed by the wall. Her breathing was deep and even, one arm flung across the pillow, her gray hair loose on the linen. She looked younger than I remembered. Fewer lines. Fewer years of grief carved into her face.
A child slept beside her. Small. Dark-haired. Curled into a ball with her thumb near her mouth and her face pressed against grandmother’s shoulder.
Me. I was looking at myself burrowed into grandmother’s warmth the way I used to when the night wandering left me too frightened to sleep alone.
Sophia folded the note. Set it on the table where Grandmother would find it in the morning. She stared at it for a long time. Then she stood and crossed to the bed.
She kissed grandmother’s forehead first. Gentle. Grandmother stirred but didn’t wake. Sophia held her breath. Waited. When the deep breathing returned, she leaned down to the child.
To me.
Her lips brushed my hair. I watched her eyes close and her face crumple, just for a second, just long enough for the grief to break through before she sealed it shut again. Her hand came up and smoothed the hair from my sleeping face. The same gesture Grandmother always made. The same tenderness.
“I’m sorry, little Red,” she whispered.
She straightened. Wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. Hard. Angry at the tears, angry at whatever had brought her to this moment. She pulled the red hood up over her dark hair, tightened the cloak around her shoulders, and turned toward the door.
She didn’t look back.
The door opened without a sound. The village street waited outside — empty and dark, every window shuttered, every hearth banked for the night. Cold air spilled across the floor and reached the bed and the child that was me pulled the blankets tighter in her sleep.
Sophia stepped out. The door closed behind her.
I followed.
She moved through the village like a ghost. Past the baker’s. Past the smithy. Past the well where women gathered in the mornings. Her red cloak the only color in a world of shadow. Nobody saw her. Nobody stirred. The village slept while a nineteen-year-old girl walked out of it forever.
She reached the tree line and didn’t pause. The forest took her in.
I tried to call her name. My mouth opened and nothing came out, the sound died before it left my throat, swallowed by the trees the way the trees swallowed everything.
I ran after her. My legs moved but the distance between us wouldn’t close.
She kept walking. I kept running. The red hood bobbed ahead of me through the dark, bright and steady, the only real thing in a world going gray.
She was crying. I could see it in the way her shoulders hitched, the way she kept wiping her face with the heel of her hand and walking faster as if speed could outrun what she was feeling.
But she didn’t stop. Didn’t turn around.
The Sensing would have been pressing on her from every direction.
Erik’s threat sitting in her bones like a second heartbeat, the truth of what he’d do to Grandmother and to me if she didn’t come.
She’d have felt it the way she felt everything.
Every lie and every intention pushing against her skin like hands in a crowd.
She knew what he was. She went anyway.
A clearing opened ahead. A man’s shape stood at its center. Tall. Broad. Perfectly still. Waiting with the patience of something that had all the time in the world.
Sophia stopped at the edge of the trees.
Her hand gripped the trunk of a birch, white bark under white knuckles.
I could see her chest heaving. The war in her body, every muscle screaming at her to run back, back to the cottage, back to Grandmother, back to the sleeping child with a stolen ribbon tied around her wrist.
The man in the clearing didn’t move. Didn’t speak. Just waited.
Sophia let go of the tree.
She walked into the clearing. His hand closed around her wrist.
The forest vanished.
I was in a cottage. Boards on the windows. Bar on the door. The same hearth, the same stone floor. But the furs on the bed were different, older, thinner, worn through in patches. And the scratches on the door were fresh. Pale gouges in dark wood, the splinters still sharp.
Sophia was on the bed. She wasn’t alone.
I couldn’t see him properly. He blurred at the edges, the way text in the grimoire blurred when the book decided I wasn’t ready.
But glimpses broke through. A mouth that was too wide.
Teeth that caught the firelight and were too long.
Hands on Sophia’s arms where the fingers ended in claws instead of nails.
The sound from his chest wasn’t a voice.
It was low and wet and it belonged to a throat that wasn’t entirely human.
His back was wrong. Too broad, the skin rippling like a second shape underneath was pressing outward, trying to get free.
Sophia screamed.
I threw myself forward. My fists hit nothing. My hands passed through them both like smoke. I was standing in the room but I wasn’t in the room. A witness trapped behind glass, watching something I couldn’t stop and couldn’t look away from.
The glimpses kept coming. Teeth sinking into the curve of her shoulder.
Those wrong hands dragging down her arms, opening red lines that bloomed on her skin.
Sophia thrashing, fighting, the sounds coming out of her no longer screams but raw, animal noise.
The sound a body makes when it’s caught in a grip it knows it isn’t getting free of.
Blood on the sheets. Blood on the wall. A flash of his face when he lifted his head, just a glimpse before the blur swallowed it again. Amber eyes. Bright and empty of anything that could be reasoned with.
Then he was gone. The door shut. The bar scraped into place from outside.
Sophia lay on the bed. The red dress was torn.
Blood soaked through the furs beneath her, dark and spreading.
Marks covered her skin, her arms, her shoulders, her throat, marks that didn’t look like they’d been made by a man’s hands.
Her eyes stared at the ceiling. Her chest rose and fell in shallow, hitching breaths.
She was alive. But the girl who’d kissed my hair and whispered I’m sorry, little Red was already starting to disappear behind her own eyes.
I dropped to my knees beside the bed. Reached for her. My hands passed through.
Time lurched.
Light through the cracks in the boards turned orange.
Then gray. Then black. Then orange again.
Days cycling in sickening jumps. The fire died and relit and died.
He came back. Left. Came back. Each time the bar scraped and the door opened and the blurred shape filled the frame, Sophia flinched smaller.
Her screams shortened into whimpers. Her fighting weakened into flinching.
The red dress faded from fresh blood to rust. Her dark hair went brittle and thin.
Her collarbones pressed through her skin like blades.
I watched it happen. Couldn’t touch her. Couldn’t speak to her. Couldn’t do anything except kneel on the floor of my aunt’s cage and watch a woman I’d loved be unmade piece by piece.
The scratches on the door multiplied. Hundreds of them. Layered over each other until the wood was furred and rough. The early ones deep and angry, gouged by fingernails that still had strength behind them. The later ones shallow. Weak.
She stopped scratching.
She stopped screaming.
She stopped getting out of bed.
The last image came in a long, slow slide.
Sophia on the bed. Her body pulled tight against her bones.
The red dress hanging loose on a frame that had no flesh left to fill it.
Her hair spread across the pillow like dead grass.
Her fingers curled inward. Her eyes sunk deep but never closing.
Just staring at the ceiling. Day after day after day.
The light cycling through the cracks and her eyes never blinking and her chest barely moving and the woman I’d known gone somewhere the walls couldn’t follow.
Until the breathing stopped.
I was on my knees. Sobbing. My hands reaching for her, wanting to close her eyes, wanting to pull the furs over her face, wanting to do the one thing nobody had done for her, be there when it ended.
My fingers brushed her cheek.
Her hand shot up and grabbed my wrist.
The grip was ice. The bones beneath her skin ground against mine. Her head turned — slow, mechanical, the dry creak of a neck that hadn’t moved in weeks. Her sunken eyes found mine. Her mouth opened.
“He’ll break you the same way he broke me.”
I screamed. Screamed until my throat tore. Her hand was locked around my wrist and her empty eyes were boring into mine and her mouth was still moving, still saying it, over and over … He’ll break you the same way he broke me.
“Sophia!” I was still screaming her name when the hands found me.