Chapter 9
Chapter Nine
Dietrich was sharpening his knife by the hearth, the steady scrape of blade against stone filling the cottage, when I heard it, faint, far away, carried on the wind like something the forest was trying to swallow before it reached me.
Baying. Dogs. The sound threaded through the trees and found the cottage and slid through the cracks in the boards and settled into my bones.
The scraping stopped. He’d heard it too.
Klaus. It had to be Klaus. Still searching. Still hunting.
“They won’t find this place.” He resumed sharpening, his back to me. “They never do.”
“How can you be sure?” I wrapped my arms around myself.
“Because they’ve tried before.” He offered nothing else.
The dogs bayed again. Closer — or maybe that was just my fear stretching the sound. I pressed my nails into my palms.
“They’re circling.” He didn’t turn from the fire. “They can’t find the path.”
I didn’t ask what path. I didn’t want to know what kind of man could hide a cottage from dogs and hunters and an entire village. The answer sat in the grimoire under the bed, in the pages I couldn’t read, and I wasn’t ready for it.
The baying faded. Grew fainter until the forest swallowed it whole. Dietrich stayed by the hearth for a long time after listening. Then he went back to his knife like nothing had happened.
He stayed that night. I heard him outside the door after dark, the soft sounds of someone settling against the wood. Keeping watch. I lay awake for hours listening to him breathe through the boards, hating that the sound of it made the walls feel less like they were closing in.
But I was thinking.
The dogs were gone. Klaus’s men had circled and lost the trail and given up.
That meant the forest between here and the village was empty, no hunters, no torches, no hounds tracking my scent through the snow.
I didn’t have to go back to the village.
There were other settlements. I’d heard traders talk about places to the east, past the river, a day’s walk through open country once you cleared the tree line.
People who didn’t know my name, didn’t know Klaus, didn’t know anything about a widow accused of witchcraft.
I could disappear. Start again. Find work as a healer somewhere no one whispered witch when I walked past.
I needed to get past Dietrich. He was bigger, stronger, faster.
I couldn’t overpower him in a fair fight.
But he trusted me enough to turn his back.
He’d been doing it for days, crouching by the hearth, working at the counter, leaving his knife on the table while he tended the fire.
He didn’t expect me to try anything because I hadn’t tried anything.
I’d screamed and raged and thrown words at him but I’d never put my hands on a weapon.
That was about to change.
All I needed was a blade and one clean moment where his guard was down.
I lay in the dark and waited for morning.
He came in with a duck, already plucked and cleaned, and set it on the table with his knife beside it. Then he crossed to the hearth to build up the fire and crouched down to arrange kindling.
His back to me. His hands busy.
Two weapons in the room. The mortar and pestle sat on the shelf by the hearth, grandmother’s, heavy stone.
Heavy enough to drop a man if it connected with the back of his skull.
But it was an arm’s length from where he crouched, and reaching for it would put me close enough for him to grab me before my fingers touched it.
The knife sat on the table. Right beside me. Still wet from where he’d cleaned the bird outside. Short blade, sharp edge, wooden handle worn smooth.
My heart hammered so hard I could feel it in my fingertips.
East. The river. The road. Emma. The village. A life that didn’t have boards on the windows and a man deciding when I could breathe.
I crossed the room in three quick steps and closed my fingers around the handle. I didn’t hesitate. Hesitation would get me caught. I raised the blade and drove it toward his back.
“Don’t.” He breathed the word — and moved.
Impossibly fast. Faster than any man should be able to move. One moment I was driving the knife toward his shoulder, the next he’d spun and caught my wrist, his fingers clamping down until the bones ground together and I gasped.
“Let go,” I snarled, twisting against his grip.
He didn’t. He twisted my arm instead and I lost my balance, stumbled forward into his chest. He caught me and we went down together, but his free hand cupped the back of my head as we fell, cradling my skull against his palm so I didn’t crack it on the stone floor.
We hit hard. The air punched out of my lungs and the ceiling swam above me, but my head was cushioned in his hand. He’d protected me. Even now, even with a knife aimed at his back, he’d protected me.
I tried to buck him off. Too heavy. Too strong. He pinned my knife hand to the floor above my head, pried my fingers open one by one until the blade clattered free, and kicked it across the room where it spun to a stop against the far wall.
“Get off me!” I thrashed beneath him, drove my knee up toward his groin. He shifted his weight and blocked it with his thigh.
I swung at his face with my free hand. My fist connected with his cheekbone and his head snapped sideways, but he didn’t let go, just caught my other wrist and brought it to his face.
He pressed his nose against the inside of my wrist. Right where the pulse hammered. And inhaled. Deep. Slow. His eyes fell shut and his whole body shuddered, a tremor that ran through him from his chest down through his hips and into the thighs braced on either side of mine.
I went still.
Every thought emptied out of my head. Every plan, every calculation, every furious word I’d been saving, gone.
Because the sound he made when he breathed me in was nothing I’d ever heard from a human mouth.
Low and broken and desperate, like a man dying of thirst who’d just found water, like breathing me in was the only thing keeping him from coming apart.
His eyes opened. They were wrong. Pupils blown so wide they’d nearly swallowed the amber, just a thin ring of gold left around the black.
He stared down at me and his face was stripped bare.
Every wall gone. Every defense dismantled.
What was underneath was raw and hungry and ancient, a need that had been starving for a very long time.
Then he pinned my other wrist above my head and held both of them with one hand. His weight pressed me into the floor, his hips between my thighs, and the evidence of what he was feeling was unmistakable. Hard and hot against me through layers of fabric.
My pulse raced. My breathing came faster.
And the thing that terrified me, the thing that made me want to scream louder than any nightmare ever had, was that it wasn’t fear making my body respond.
A heat gathered low in my belly, a softening, an opening.
My hips shifted against him before I could stop them.
A tiny movement, involuntary, traitorous.
His breath caught and his grip on my wrists tightened and his eyes went so dark they were almost black.
His gaze dropped to my mouth. He leaned closer.
His breath ghosted across my lips and I could smell him, pine and smoke and the animal musk underneath, the same scent from the wolf in the forest, the same scent that had followed me through days of captivity and worked its way into the furs and the walls and my own skin until I couldn’t tell where he ended and the cottage began.
His mouth was an inch from mine. Less.
Then he caught himself.
He released my wrists and shoved himself off me so fast he stumbled backward into the hearth. The iron poker clattered to the floor. “Don’t attack me again.” His tone was rough. “I’m trying to keep you alive. Don’t make this harder than it has to be.”
“You’re just like him.” I shoved myself upright, my whole body shaking, with rage, with shame, with the treacherous heat still pulsing between my thighs. “Your father. You pin me down, you, you were going to ...”
“I wasn’t,” he cut me off.
“Liar!” I scrambled to my feet, fists clenched at my sides. “I felt you! You had me on the floor, you smelled me, like an animal. What kind of man does that?”
He went rigid. Every muscle in his back pulled taut and I watched the tremor run through him like a second body was trying to claw its way out from underneath his skin.
“You responded too.” Still wouldn’t face me. “Don’t pretend you didn’t.”
The words hit me hard.
“What?” I breathed.
He turned then. Looked at me — hard and unflinching and terrible.
“Your body responded to mine. I felt it.” His eyes held mine and I couldn’t look away, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move. “Don’t act like I forced that from you.”
My hand cracked across his face before I could think.
The sound echoed through the cottage. His head went sideways and color rose fast across his cheekbone. Three times I’d hit him now. Three times he’d let me.
“Get out,” I demanded, my hands balled at my sides.
“Talia ...” He took a step toward me, one hand half-raised.
“Get out!” I screamed it with everything I had, screamed it until my throat tore and the walls rang with it.
He stopped. His hands dropped to his sides. He grabbed the knife from where it had fallen and the one still on the table, tucked both into his belt with jerky, unsteady movements. Then he pulled his coat from the peg and shoved his arms through the sleeves without meeting my eyes.
He walked out and drove the door shut hard enough to rattle the boards in the windows. The bar ground into place and his footsteps faded into the forest, faster than usual, almost running.
I stood there shaking. My hand stung from the slap. My wrist burned where he’d gripped it. And between my thighs, where his weight had pressed me open, the heat still throbbed, unwanted, undeniable, a betrayal so complete I couldn’t look at it straight.
I sank down against the wall and drew my knees to my chest and pressed my face into them.
He was my captor. Erik’s son. The man keeping me in Sophia’s cage.
He’d pinned me to the floor and pressed himself against me and breathed me in like my scent was something he needed to survive.
And my body had arched into him. My hips had moved.
My blood had answered his like they were speaking the same language, a language I didn’t know and hadn’t consented to learn.
I sat there until the fire burned low. Until the cold crept in and made me shiver. Until my legs went numb and the trembling finally stopped.
Then I crawled to the bed and pulled the furs over my head and tried to hate myself clean.
I failed.