Chapter 13
Chapter Thirteen
We stopped fighting. I wasn’t sure when it happened, there was no truce, no conversation, just the slow erosion of hostility into something neither of us had a name for.
He started teaching me things without either of us deciding he would. It began with the snares. I’d watched him mend them enough times that one morning I picked up a broken one from the table and turned it over in my hands.
“You’re holding it wrong.” He didn’t look up from the hearth.
“Then show me,” I challenged.
He crossed to the table and sat down across from me, took the snare from my hands and held it up.
“The loop needs to sit here,” he explained, threading the gut string through the wooden frame with fingers that made the work look effortless.
“Too high and the rabbit runs under it. Too low and it triggers before anything steps through.”
“How do you know where to set it?” I watched his hands, trying to memorise the movements.
“You look for the runs.” He leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “Tracks in the snow. Droppings. Places where the bark’s been chewed low on the trunks. Rabbits are creatures of habit — they use the same paths over and over. Find the path and the snare does the rest.”
“Who taught you?” I asked, taking the frame back and trying to copy what he’d done. The gut string slipped through my fingers and I swore under my breath.
“Taught myself.” He shrugged. “After my father left. First winter I nearly starved because every trap I built fell apart.” He reached across and adjusted my grip without thinking about it, his fingers over mine, repositioning them on the string.
“Took me months to figure out the tension. Lost a lot of rabbits.”
“My grandmother tried to teach me once.” I worked the string through the loop the way he’d shown me. “I was too young. My fingers wouldn’t do what she told them to.”
“They’re doing fine now.” When I looked up he was watching my hands with an expression I couldn’t read.
“You always do that.” I kept my eyes on the string.
“Do what?”
“Watch.” I tied the knot — clumsy, but it held. “You’ve always watched. Even before all this.”
His fingers stilled on the table.
“I remember you.” I tossed it out like it meant nothing, my eyes on the snare in my hands like it was the most interesting thing in the room. “At the market. When I was small. You were standing behind your father near the baker’s stall and you wouldn’t stop staring at me.”
He didn’t answer. The quiet between us pulled tight, charged, the air before a storm.
“I was eating a honey cake,” I continued, still working the snare, still not looking at him. “And Grandmother was holding my hand. And this boy was just — watching me. Like I was the only thing in the whole market worth looking at.”
I heard him exhale. Long and slow.
“Grandmother noticed.” I kept my tone even.
“She pulled me behind her skirt and said something to your father. I couldn’t hear what.
I was too small. But the way she spoke told me she was frightened underneath.
” I glanced up. “Your father grabbed your arm and pulled you away. You looked back at me over your shoulder while he dragged you through the crowd.”
He was very still. His eyes were on the table, on the snare frame between us, on anything that wasn’t my face.
“You remember.” It wasn’t a question.
“The honey cake,” he confirmed after a long pause. “The red ribbon in your hair.” He picked up a piece of gut string and wound it around his finger, unwound it, wound it again. “I remember your grandmother’s face when she saw me looking.”
“Why were you staring?” I asked.
“I was a boy.” He kept winding the string. “Boys stare.”
That was not an answer. His hands were shaking on the gut string.
His shoulders had gone rigid. I understood then that whatever the real answer was, it lived in the same locked room as everything else he would not tell me, the healing wound, the not-quite-human sound he made when he told the gray wolf to leave.
“Here.” I held up the finished snare. “Did I do it right?”
He looked at it. Looked at me. Gratitude, maybe, that I’d let him off the hook. Or surprise that I’d chosen to.
“The knot needs tightening.” He reached across to adjust it, and we went back to the lesson like the conversation hadn’t happened.
But it had. And I could see it sitting in him for the rest of the day, the memory, the market, the boy who wouldn’t stop staring at the girl with the honey cake and the red ribbon.
He carried it the way he carried everything, silently, with his back straight and his face turned away, like if he didn’t look at it directly it couldn’t hurt him.
I wondered how long he’d been watching me. How many years. How many times he’d stood in the trees while I lived my small, ordinary life in the village and never knew he was there.
The thought should have frightened me.
It didn’t.
And that frightened me more than anything.
The dream started the way running starts, with the ground already moving under my feet.
I was in the forest. Barefoot, bare-skinned, wearing nothing but the red cloak, the wool rough against my body and the cold sliding past me like water around a stone.
I should have been freezing. I wasn’t. The dream wouldn’t let me feel anything except the running and the thing behind me and the strange, reckless joy of being chased by something that didn’t want to catch me. Only to keep me moving.
The black wolf.
I could hear it behind me, the heavy rhythm of its paws on frozen ground, the sound of its breathing, the soft chuffing noise it made when I changed direction.
Playing. That’s what this was. A game with rules I knew in my bones even though my waking mind had never learned them.
I ran and it followed and neither of us was afraid.
The trees opened into a clearing and I burst through the gap between two ancient oaks and stopped, my chest heaving, my hair tangled with pine needles, the cloak settling around me like a second skin. I turned.
The wolf stood at the edge of the tree line. Enormous and black and beautiful — fur so dark it ate the moonlight, eyes like liquid gold, its body still and watchful. Steam curled from its mouth with each slow exhale.
It took a step into the clearing. Then another. Moving toward me the way the tide moves toward shore, patient, inevitable, certain of where it was going because it had been going there forever.
I backed up until the bark of the oak pressed against my bare shoulders.
The wolf kept coming. Closed the distance until I could feel the heat pouring off its body, could see the individual hairs in its black fur catching the starlight, could smell pine and earth and a musk underneath that was wild and male and made my stomach clench.
It stopped in front of me. Its head was level with my chin, the golden eyes looking up at me with an expression that had no business being on an animal’s face. Patience. Devotion. A hunger so vast and so carefully leashed that looking at it felt like standing at the edge of a cliff.
The fear drained out of me like water through open fingers. What replaced it was warmth — heavy, nameless, that started in my chest and spread downward, loosening my muscles, softening my spine against the bark, gathering in the low, dark places of my body where wanting lived.
The wolf lowered its head.
And then it wasn’t the wolf anymore.
Dietrich knelt in front of me in the snow, naked, his hands sliding under the cloak and gripping my hips, his fingers pressing into the flesh hard enough to anchor me to the tree.
His mouth was on my stomach before I could draw breath, warm and open, moving downward in a line that left heat blazing in its wake, each kiss lower than the last, deliberate and unhurried, like a man who knew exactly where he was going and intended to take his time getting there.
“Please,” I heard myself say. The word came out wrecked. I didn’t know what I was begging for. Just knew I’d die if he stopped.
His mouth found me.
The pleasure was blinding — a white-hot surge that buckled my knees and tore a cry from my throat and would have dropped me if his hands hadn’t been holding me up, pinning my hips to the bark while his mouth worked and my fingers twisted into his hair and my head fell back against the oak and the stars blurred above me into streaks of silver light.
I looked down.
The black wolf looked back up at me. Golden eyes. Dark fur. Its mouth still on me, still moving, and the pleasure didn’t stop, it intensified, sharpened, climbed toward something I couldn’t outrun.
I should have screamed. Should have shoved it away, should have felt the horror of what was happening crash over me like cold water.
I couldn’t. The pleasure had swallowed the horror whole and left nothing behind except the climbing, the tightening, the wave building at the base of my spine that was going to break me apart.
It broke.
I screamed and the clearing went white and I felt myself falling and there was cold. Nothing but cold.
I was standing in snow. The shift I’d worn to bed was soaked through and plastered to my skin and the wind was cutting through it like it wasn’t there. My feet were bare and already numb and I was shaking so hard my teeth rattled.
The dream was still in my body. I could feel it, the phantom heat, the lingering pulse between my thighs, the evidence of my release cooling against my inner thighs in the freezing air.
The shame hit me like a wave of nausea. The wolf.
The man. The way they’d been the same thing. The way I’d wanted it.
I shoved the thought down so hard it left a bruise in my mind.
The night wandering. The same curse that had followed me my whole life, walking in my sleep, ending up in places I had no memory of choosing. The river when I was a girl. The forest when Sophia disappeared. And now here, wherever here was.