Chapter 12 #2
The creature circled again, blood dripping from a gash on its shoulder where my power had cut it. The wound didn’t slow it down. Its yellow eyes tracked me with the same twisted hunger, the same low sounds rumbling from its chest.
It crouched. Ready to try again.
I raised my hands. Reached for the heat. Reached for the power.
Empty. The well was dry. I was drained, spent, standing in a frozen clearing in a torn shift with blood running down my back and nothing left between me and this creature except cold air.
It sprang.
A body crashed through the trees with enough force to shake the ground.
The creature twisted mid-leap and landed sideways, skidding through the snow. Its head snapped toward the sound and for the first time its body went rigid with something that wasn’t hunger.
Fear.
Dietrich stood between two massive oaks at the edge of the clearing.
Blood crusted on his temple where I’d hit him, dried in a dark line that ran from his hairline to his chin.
His shirt was damp with sweat despite the cold and his chest heaving, sweat on his skin despite the cold.
His hands hung loose at his sides. No weapon, no knife, nothing but empty fists and fury written across every line of his body.
His eyes found mine for a moment. Rage and relief and hurt and betrayal, all tangled together in a look that lasted less than a second but said everything I’d done to him back to me. The kiss, the mortar, the blood on the floor.
Then he turned away from me and walked into the clearing, positioning himself between me and the creature with the unhurried stride of a man who had done this before and would do it again and was very, very tired of it.
“Go.” Low and cold, the word carried through the clearing like a whip crack.
The gray creature froze. Its ears flattened against its skull and its massive body dropped lower, the aggression draining out of its posture.
It stared at Dietrich with an expression I’d never seen on an animal’s face.
Recognition, and underneath the recognition, a thing that looked very much like fear.
It knew him.
“I said go,” Dietrich repeated, and the sound crawled across my skin and raised every hair on my body. The tone had changed. Deepened. It wasn’t quite human anymore. A second register lived underneath it, a frequency meant for ears other than mine.
The creature’s lips pulled back one last time, teeth bared, a final show of defiance that lasted exactly as long as it took for Dietrich to take one step forward.
Then the defiance collapsed. Its body shuddered and the bones began to crack, joints grinding, the massive frame folding in on itself.
The arms shortened. The spine curved. The clawed hands that had pinned me to the snow became paws, the upright shape dropping onto all fours with a wet sound like something tearing loose inside.
What stood in the clearing now was still enormous, still twice the size of any natural wolf, scarred and gray and panting.
But it was a wolf. Just a wolf. It turned and fled, crashing through the underbrush, the sound of its paws fading until the forest swallowed it and everything went quiet.
I stared at Dietrich’s back. A man standing unarmed in a frozen clearing had just driven off a creature that towered over him, forced it back into its lesser shape with nothing but a word and one step forward.
The creature had recognized him. Had feared him.
Had obeyed him the way a dog obeys a master it knows can hurt it.
The questions piled up but my legs wouldn’t hold.
The power was gone, the adrenaline was gone, and what was left couldn’t support the weight of a woman standing upright.
My knees buckled and I caught myself on the trunk of the oak behind me and slid down it until I was sitting in the snow with the grimoire in my lap and the cloak around my shoulders and blood running down my back.
Dietrich turned around slowly.
His expression was terrible. Cold and compressed, like all his emotions had been forced through a sieve until only the most dangerous parts remained. He crossed the distance between us in four strides and his hand closed around my upper arm, his grip like iron.
“You’re coming back,” he said through his teeth. “Now.”
“I can’t...” I started.
He pulled me to my feet. My legs screamed and my hip buckled but he held me upright with one hand and started walking, pulling me with him through the snow. I stumbled after because the only alternative was being dragged.
The forest passed in a blur of dark trunks and white snow and the sound of him ahead of me. Hard steps. Controlled fury. He didn’t speak. Didn’t look back. Just walked with my arm locked in his grip and the dried blood on his temple catching the moonlight.
The cottage appeared through the trees. The door still hung open, firelight spilling out into the darkness.
He pulled me through the doorway and released my arm so suddenly I stumbled and caught myself on the table.
The warmth from the fire washed over me and I realized how cold I’d been, how completely numb my hands and feet had gone, how close I’d come to freezing before anything in the forest could have killed me.
He walked past me and shoved the door shut. The bar dropped into place. Then he crossed to the hearth and stood with his back to me, his shoulders rising and falling with breaths he was fighting to control.
Minutes passed. The hearth gave off a steady burn.
Wind pressed against the boarded windows.
I stood by the table dripping snow and blood onto the floor and waited for him to speak because I had no words left.
Everything I’d planned, everything I’d calculated, every clever manipulation I’d spent days constructing.
It was all gone, burned away by the clearing and the wolf and the look on his face when he’d found me.
“What was that thing?” I finally managed. “It wasn’t a wolf. Wolves don’t stand like that. Wolves don’t have hands.”
He didn’t turn. “What would you like me to say?”
“The truth. What was it?”
He didn’t answer me.
“Dietrich. That creature stood seven feet tall. It walked on two legs. It shifted into a wolf when you told it to go. I watched it happen. I watched bones break and a body fold in half. So don’t tell me it was just a wolf.”
“I’m not telling you anything,” he cut back, and I could hear the lock turn behind it.
“You cracked my skull open. Left me bleeding on the floor. I woke up and you were gone.”
The subject change hit me like cold water. He’d shoved the question aside and buried it under the thing that mattered more to him. Under the hurt.
“I had to...” I started.
“I know what you had to do.” He finally faced me, and his expression was broken. The anger had burned through to what lived underneath, raw and exhausted and wounded in a way that couldn’t be stitched closed. “You had to escape. You saw an opportunity and you took it.”
“Yes.” I met his eyes because he deserved that much. “I did.”
“You kissed me.” The tendons stood taut in his neck. He ground each one out like it cost him. “Touched me. Made me think...”
He stopped. Turned back to the fire.
“Made you think what?” I asked, even though my chest was splitting open with every word.
“It doesn’t matter.” His tone went flat.
“It matters.”
“You used me.” He gripped the mantel until his arms shook, until the wood creaked under his hands. “Over two decades, Talia. Do you understand? Over two decades without...”
He stopped again. His shoulders were shaking.
“Without what?” I stepped closer.
“Without anyone.” The word split open in his mouth like a confession he’d been holding between his teeth for years. “Without a single person touching me who wasn’t trying to hurt me or drive me away. And you, for one moment I thought...”
He pressed his forehead against the mantel and I watched his shoulders shake and realized he was fighting a thing bigger than anger, bigger than betrayal.
He was fighting the grief of a man who’d let himself hope for the first time in twenty-two years and had the hope smashed against his skull with a stone mortar.
“You thought what?” I whispered.
“That I wasn’t alone anymore.” He spoke into the stone above the fire, so softly I almost missed it. “That someone actually wanted… that someone could look at me and see...” He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. You did what you had to do.”
“I did.” I held my ground despite the shaking inside me. “And I’d do it again.”
He flinched. His whole body flinched, a full-body recoil like I’d hit him with the mortar a second time.
The guilt hit me then. The full weight of what I’d done landing on my chest all at once.
I’d taken the only tenderness this man had felt in a long time and weaponized it.
I’d kissed him and let him touch me and let him believe, even for a moment, that someone wanted him.
And then I’d cracked his skull open while his mouth was still on my breast.
“I’m sorry I hurt you,” I offered, though it wasn’t nearly enough.
He went very still.
“I’m not sorry I tried to escape. But I’m sorry I had to hurt you to do it.”
He didn’t respond.
“And I’m sorry I used what you feel.” The words stuck and I forced them out. “I’m sorry I made you think it was real.”
He lifted his head. Turned just enough that I could see his profile. The dried blood, the swelling at his temple, the wet line tracking down his cheek that might have been sweat or might not have been.
“Was any of it?” he asked. Quiet. Almost nothing.
I opened my mouth to say no. To say it was all performance, all calculation, every touch and look and whispered word designed to dismantle him. That’s what I should have said. That’s what would have been clean and honest and kind in its cruelty. A sharp cut instead of a slow bleed.
But I couldn’t. Because it would have been a lie, and I’d already lied to him enough.