Chapter 17
Chapter Seventeen
The third morning, I looked at the hole in the wall and the door lying in the snow and the cold pouring through both, and I made a decision that had nothing to do with forgiveness and everything to do with the fact that winter was trying to kill us and the cottage was losing.
“Get up,” I ordered from across the room.
He lifted his head from the furs. His eyes were wary, uncertain — the look of a man who’d spent two days of silence waiting for the axe to fall.
“The wall needs patching,” I continued, pulling on my cloak and grandmother’s boots. “The door needs hanging. I can’t do either alone.”
He stood, slowly, carefully, favoring his left side where the deepest gash was still closing, and pulled on his shirt and trousers and boots without a word.
We worked through the morning. He cut timber from a fallen oak near the clearing while I hauled the pieces back and held them in place while he fitted them into the gap.
We packed moss and mud between the logs.
My hands went numb from the cold and his were steady despite the injuries and neither of us spoke except to coordinate.
“Higher on the left,” I directed, bracing a log against my shoulder.
He adjusted without comment.
The door took longer. He hammered iron scraps into new hinges on a flat rock near the hearth, the clang of metal filling the cottage. I held the door in place while he fitted them, my arms aching, his hands working above mine, close enough that I could feel the heat of his skin.
When the door swung closed and latched for the first time, we both stood there looking at it.
“It works,” I confirmed.
“It works,” he agreed.
I turned to go inside and he spoke.
“There’s something I need to show you.”
I stopped. Didn’t turn around.
“You don’t have to talk to me,” he added. Two days of silence had roughened everything about him. “You don’t have to forgive me or listen to me or look at me. But you need to see this.”
I turned. He was standing in the snow with soot on his hands and blood seeping through his bandages where the work had pulled at the healing gashes, and his face held something I hadn’t seen on it before. Grief. Old and heavy and carried so long it had worn grooves into him.
“Follow me,” he requested quietly.
He walked around the back of the cottage. Past the woodpile. Past the spot where he drew water. I followed because curiosity was stronger than anger, and because the look on his face told me this wasn’t a trick or a defense or an attempt to win me back.
A birch tree stood alone against the tree line, its white bark peeling in thin sheets, its bare branches scratching against the gray sky.
At its base, a mound. Low and weathered and covered in snow, so old it had almost disappeared back into the earth.
Dietrich stopped a few feet away. He didn’t say anything. Just stood there with his hands at his sides and let me look.
I knelt in the snow and brushed the white away until I could see the frozen earth beneath.
I looked at the trunk. There — carved deep into the bark, the letters thick and uneven, cut by a young man’s hand:
SOPHIA
The sound that came out of me wasn’t a word. It was something older than language, a raw, animal noise from the deepest part of my chest. My aunt was under this dirt. Had been under it for a long time.
“I found her when I first came here,” Dietrich offered from behind me, and the words fell apart as he said them. “On the floor near the hearth. The fire had gone out. She was still wearing the red dress your grandmother had made her.”
I pressed my hand flat against the frozen earth and felt nothing, no warmth, no pulse, no ghost. Just cold ground and a dead girl underneath it.
“I was nineteen,” he went on, each word pulled from him like a splinter from deep in the flesh.
“I buried her and carved her name because I didn’t know what else to do.
I didn’t know any prayers. Didn’t know any words that would be enough.
So I just — put her in the ground and said I was sorry and stayed. ”
I pressed my forehead against the cold bark and sobbed. For Sophia. For the girl who’d braided my hair and called me little Red. The nineteen-year-old who’d walked into the forest to save her family and died behind boarded windows in her own mother’s home.
Dietrich stood behind me. He didn’t touch me. Didn’t try to comfort me. Just stood there while I wept, and I could hear his breathing, uneven and hitching in a way that told me he was crying too.
When the sobs ran dry, I stayed kneeling. The cold had soaked through my dress and numbed my knees and I didn’t care.
“You visit her,” I stated. I could see it — the path worn in the snow between the cottage and the tree, packed down by years of feet. His feet.
“As often as I can. She deserved someone remembering her,” he replied quietly. “Even if it was just me.”
The anger didn’t leave. It didn’t soften or ease or resolve into something cleaner.
But it shifted. Made room for something else — not forgiveness, not understanding, just the recognition that the man standing behind me had buried a girl he’d never known, carved her name into a tree, and visited her grave because he believed she deserved to be remembered.
Monsters didn’t do that. Whatever else he was, wolf, liar, predator bred to hunt my kind, he’d done that.
I wiped my face. Stood. My knees buckled and I caught myself against the trunk.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered to the frozen earth. “I’m sorry I didn’t come sooner. I’m sorry you walked into the forest for us and I spent so many years not understanding what you’d done.”
The birch tree creaked in the wind.
“I’m going to kill him,” I told her. “For you. For grandmother. For William. I’ll find a way.”
Snow fell — light, fine flakes that landed on the mound and melted.
I turned and walked back toward the cottage. Dietrich followed at a distance. Neither of us spoke until we were inside and the new door was shut and the fire was crackling and the wreckage of our shared life was all around us on the floor.
I sat on the bed. He stood by the hearth. Sophia’s grave had done something that two days of silence and a morning of labor couldn’t. It hadn’t fixed us. It had just made the breaking more complicated.
“Your father was feral for twenty-two years after Sophia,” I began. “And the night my Forceweaving woke, it snapped him back.”
“Yes,” he confirmed.
“You brought me to Sophia’s prison,” I continued, each word laid down like a stone. “The one place in this forest that reeks of blood-keeper. And your father found me here.”
“I didn’t know he’d woken,” Dietrich insisted. He cracked on the last word. “I thought he was still feral ...”
“Feral,” I spat. “Your feral father killed my husband and six armed men. Tore them to pieces in a clearing. That’s not feral, Dietrich. That’s a killer.”
“Feral doesn’t mean stupid,” Dietrich clarified, his eyes going distant.
“It means the man is gone and the wolf is running the body. And wolves are brilliant hunters, they ambush, they flank, they coordinate kills without a single conscious thought. My father killed your husband on instinct. Smelled blood-keeper scent on a human male, registered it as a territorial threat, and eliminated it. Seven men, six minutes. The wolf didn’t plan it.
Didn’t think about it. It just happened the way a hawk happens to a rabbit.
” He swallowed. “The feral wolf is pure reflex. What woke up when your power called to him, that’s the man coming back.
And the man is worse than the wolf ever was, because the man can plan. ”
“I know what you thought,” I cut in. “I’m telling you what happened. He walked through that doorway and told me he’d been watching for weeks. He laid a trail to lure you away. He was thinking, Dietrich. Planning. The same man who caged my aunt was coming for me.”
He flinched. The full-body kind.
“Were you there?” I demanded, and the question had been sitting inside me since the bow conversation, since he’d known William’s laugh, since he’d said I know with a weight that told me he wasn’t guessing. “When William died. Were you in the forest?”
His hands stilled on his knees.
“I heard it,” he admitted. “I was half a mile away. By the time I reached the clearing it was over. Your husband and his men were ...” He stopped. His Adam’s apple bobbed. “My father was already gone. There was nothing left to save.”
“You could have warned them,” I pressed, tears burning my face. “You watched the village for years. You knew William hunted in that forest. You could have ...”
“And told him what?” Dietrich’s voice cracked.
“A stranger walks out of the woods and tells your husband not to hunt here because a feral werewolf is running these trails?” He looked at me and the grief in his face was old and deep and worn smooth from carrying.
“He’d have laughed at me the way he laughed at you when you begged him to stay home. ”
He was right. William had laughed. William had kissed my forehead and promised he’d come back and walked out the door anyway.
“I couldn’t save him, Talia.” He stripped himself bare with it. “I’ve carried that for sixteen years. I couldn’t save him and I couldn’t save you from the grief and I’ve hated myself for both every single day.”
Neither of us spoke. We’d each blamed ourselves for the same death for sixteen years, and neither of us was wrong.
“Your father told me what taking a blood-keeper does to a werewolf,” I went on, because stopping now would mean feeling it and I couldn’t afford to feel it yet.
His face went gray.
“And you knew,” I pressed, my nails digging into my own arms. “You knew what your father became after Sophia. You could smell her power on him.”