Chapter 13 #2
The cottage door stood open behind me, maybe thirty feet away, firelight spilling into the darkness.
The bar lay on the ground beside the threshold.
I’d moved it in my sleep, moved that heavy wooden bar with the power I couldn’t control, even unconscious, even lost in a dream about a wolf with golden eyes.
I took a step toward the cottage. Toward warmth. Toward safety.
My foot broke through something.
The crack split the silence — a hard, brittle snap beneath my weight, nothing like snow. Lines raced outward from my foot in every direction, black veins spreading across a white surface.
Ice. I was standing on ice.
I looked down and my heart seized. A frozen lake stretched around me in every direction, white and flat and featureless except for the cracks spreading from where I stood.
The water beneath the ice was black. Bottomless.
I could see it through the fractures, dark and patient, waiting for the surface to give way.
I didn’t dare breathe. Didn’t dare shift my weight. Stood absolutely still with the cold burning the soles of my feet and the cracks widening with soft, terrible sounds like whispered warnings.
The ice was already failing. I could hear it — a low groan building beneath me, the sound of a hold giving way.
Then it stopped.
The surface dropped out from under me and the black water swallowed me whole.
The cold was beyond anything I had language for.
It wasn’t a sensation — it was an erasure.
It wiped out thought, wiped out feeling, wiped out everything except a single screaming nerve that knew I was dying.
My lungs locked. My muscles froze. The water closed over my head and the world became black and silent and absolute.
I tried to kick. Tried to claw my way upward.
My body wouldn’t respond — the cold had severed the connection between what I wanted and what my limbs could do.
I was sinking. Deeper. The darkness thickening around me and the pressure building in my chest and the black spots at the edges of my vision spreading like ink dropped into water.
This was how I died. In a frozen lake in the middle of nowhere because I’d sleepwalked out of a dream about a wolf’s mouth between my legs.
Then something crashed through the surface above me.
Arms wrapped around my chest. Strong, sure, impossibly warm against the cold that had frozen me solid.
They pulled me upward through the dark water with a strength that shouldn’t have been possible, one arm locked around my ribs, legs kicking beneath us, driving us toward the surface with a force that felt less like a man swimming and more like a current reversing itself.
We broke through. I gasped and choked and coughed water that tasted like mud and rot and old copper underneath. The air burned my lungs worse than the water had.
“I have you.” Dietrich pulled me tighter against him, his mouth near my ear. “Hold on. I have you.”
He dragged me toward the edge of the broken ice, kicking hard, his breath coming in sharp grunts with each stroke.
Hauled himself out first, his hands finding purchase on the solid edge, his shoulders bunching with effort, then reached back and pulled me up after him with hands that shook from cold or fear or both.
He didn’t pause. Didn’t catch his breath. He gathered me up in his arms and ran, barefoot on frozen ground, soaking wet, carrying my weight like it was nothing, his legs driving through the snow in long strides that ate the distance to the cottage.
I couldn’t stop trembling. Couldn’t feel my hands or feet or face. Couldn’t do anything except hang in his arms and let the shaking run its course.
He kicked the cottage door wide and carried me to the bed and set me down on the furs. His hands went to my shift immediately, pulling the soaked fabric over my head with quick, efficient movements that left no room for modesty or hesitation.
“You’re hypothermic.” He was already stripping off his own drenched shirt. “Body heat. Fastest way.”
The shift came off. Then his trousers, his boots, everything, stripped with the practiced speed of a man who understood that seconds mattered and embarrassment didn’t.
He was bare in the firelight, pale skin and lean muscle and the scars I’d traced with my eyes for weeks, and then he was in the bed beside me and his arms were pulling me against him and the furs were coming up over both of us.
Heat poured off his skin like he was burning from the inside, radiating from every point where our bodies touched, his chest against my back, his thighs pressed behind mine, his arms wrapped tight around my ribs.
This wasn’t normal body warmth. This was something else entirely, something that defied every piece of medical knowledge I possessed, a furnace behind his skin that shouldn’t exist in any human body.
I didn’t care. I pressed myself into it — pressed every frozen inch of my skin against every burning inch of his, trying to steal every scrap of heat I could, trying to stop the shaking that wouldn’t stop. My teeth chattered so hard I thought they’d crack.
“You’re safe,” he murmured against my hair, his breath warm on my scalp. “You’re alive. You’re safe.”
I was crying. The sobs came from somewhere deep and raw, shaking through my body in waves that had nothing to do with the cold and everything to do with the dream and the ice and the feeling of the water closing over my head and the certainty, absolute, bone-deep certainty, that I was going to die alone in the dark.
He held me through it. One hand cradled the back of my head, the other rubbed slow circles on my back, and he said nothing because there was nothing to say. Just held me and let me cry and kept the heat pouring off his impossible body into mine.
Minutes passed. Maybe longer. The trembling slowed.
The sobs lost their edges and turned to shuddering breaths and then to silence.
His heat had found the frozen places inside me and was thawing them one by one, my fingers first, then my feet, then the deep core of cold that had settled behind my ribs and made every breath feel like inhaling broken glass.
I should have pulled away. I was warm enough now, warm enough to survive, warm enough that continued contact was no longer medical necessity but something else entirely.
I could feel him, all of him, pressed against my back, and despite the cold, despite the terror, despite everything, my body was aware of his in ways that had nothing to do with heat exchange.
I didn’t pull away.
“I can’t sleep,” I whispered into the dark.
“You don’t have to,” he replied, his arms tightening slightly. “Just rest. Just breathe.”
“I keep seeing a horrible sight.” I pressed my face against his shoulder. “Every time I close my eyes.”
His hand stilled on my back. “The lake?”
“You.” The word came out small and frightened. “I see you dying.”
His body went quiet beneath me. Every muscle suddenly still, his body held.
“Tell me.” His arms tightened around me.
So I told him. In halting, broken pieces, the way visions come out when you try to translate them from the language of blood and bone into words that other people can understand.
I told him about seeing him on frozen ground with his chest torn open, blood steaming in the cold air.
About the gray wolf circling him, yellow eyes gleaming with triumph.
About feeling his ribs crack and his blood pour and his lungs fill, feeling it like it was happening to me, like the pain was mine, like we were connected in a way I couldn’t see or name or understand.
He listened without speaking. His arms stayed around me and his heartbeat stayed steady beneath my ear and he let me talk until the talking was done.
When I finished, the silence lasted a long time.
“It’s happened before.” I closed my eyes. “The visions. I’ve seen things that came true.”
“What do you mean?” He asked, carefully.
“William.” I swallowed against the tightness in my throat. “The morning he died.”
He already knew about William’s death. He’d said I know when I’d told him about the six men, about the pieces in the clearing. He’d known the sound of William’s laugh and the way he hunted and things he shouldn’t have known unless he’d been watching from the trees for years.
But he didn’t know this part.
“I woke up that morning with a vision sitting on my chest like a stone.” I pressed my face against his collarbone. “I’d seen something in the forest. A creature with teeth. And I knew, knew in my bones, that if William walked into those woods he wouldn’t come back.”
His hand found my hair. Threaded through the wet strands slowly, gently, the way you soothe an animal that’s been hurt.
“I begged him,” I whispered. “I got on my knees in front of the door and begged him not to go. I told him about the dream. Told him I had a nightmare and saw him in it.” The tears came again, sixteen years of them, stored up and compounding interest. “And he kissed my forehead and told me I worried too much and walked out anyway.”
Dietrich’s hand stilled in my hair. He’d gone still.
“I couldn’t make him believe me.” The words tasted like the thing I’d been choking on for sixteen years.
“I couldn’t make anyone believe me. They looked at me like I was hysterical.
Like my fear was a woman’s weakness and nothing more.
” I pressed my face harder into the hollow of his shoulder.
“And that night they brought his body back in pieces and all I could think was that I’d known.
I’d warned him and he didn’t listen and now he was dead because I wasn’t enough to make him stay. ”
“You were enough,” Dietrich said, and his tone had an edge I hadn’t heard before, fierce and sharp and aimed at something that wasn’t me.
“You warned him. You begged him. You got on your knees. He chose not to listen. That’s his failure and the failure of every man who laughed at you and told you your fear was nothing.
” His arms tightened around me. “The guilt isn’t yours to carry. It was never yours.”
“I should have done more,” I whispered.
“You can’t force people to believe you,” he replied, his knuckles grazing my cheekbone, wiping the tears that had pooled there. “You can’t make them listen when they’ve already decided you’re not worth hearing. All you can do is warn them and hope. And you did. You did everything a person can do.”
We lay in silence for a long time. His words didn’t erase the guilt…
it was too old, too deep, woven into the foundation of who I’d become.
But the way he said it, the anger on my behalf, the certainty that I wasn’t to blame, shifted the weight.
Like someone had put their hands under the stone I’d been carrying alone and was helping me hold it.
I tilted my head back to look at his face. He was already looking down at me.
“Thank you,” I whispered. “For saying that. Even if I can’t believe it yet.”
“You will.” His breath stirred my hair. “Someday.”
His touch lingered on my face, the backs of his fingers against my cheekbone, careful and tentative, as if I were something he’d found in the forest and was afraid of breaking.
Then he leaned down and pressed his mouth to my forehead. Soft. Tender. A kiss that was nothing like the one I’d used to destroy him, no hunger in it, no calculation, just the quiet pressure of lips against skin and the warmth in my hair.
I closed my eyes. A knot loosened inside me — one I’d been carrying so long I’d stopped feeling the rope.
His mouth moved to my temple. Then my cheekbone, right where his fingers had been. Then the corner of my eye, his lips coming away wet with my tears.
Each touch was feather-light. Given, not taken. Offered, not demanded. The opposite of everything that had happened between us — the pinning, the mortar, the seduction, the lies.
I turned my face toward his. Our mouths were an inch apart. Less. I could feel his breath on my lips, the coarse edge of his beard almost touching my chin, and see every fleck of gold in his amber eyes and the small scar at the corner of his mouth I’d never noticed before.
We stared at each other. The fire crackled. The wind pressed against the boarded windows. Somewhere in the forest the gray wolf was waiting and the world outside this bed was full of teeth.
But inside it there was only this. His eyes and mine. His breath and mine. The inch between us that neither of us was willing to close because closing it meant choosing it and choosing it meant meaning it.
I closed the distance.
I kissed him.