Chapter 23 #2
I felt the black wolf’s awareness of me, my approach, my power, the blood on my hands. His fierce pride and his grief and his absolute trust that whatever I’d done in those trees, I’d done because it needed doing.
And beneath it — offered, not demanded, felt in a way words could never carry:
He was mine. If I wanted him.
I walked into the clearing.
The black wolf looked at me. Golden eyes bright with pain and exhaustion. It adjusted its grip and pressed the gray wolf flat against the snow until there was nowhere left to move.
“Make him shift,” I ordered.
The black wolf bit down harder and the gray wolf howled and its body started to change.
Dietrich was forcing it. His jaws commanding his father’s body the way an alpha commands a lesser wolf.
The gray fur rippled and pulled back and the bones cracked and reshaped and the massive body got smaller and smaller until what lay in the snow beneath the black wolf’s jaws was just a man.
Old. White hair matted with blood. A face carved deep with lines that had nothing to do with laughter. Lean and scarred and wasted. But those eyes were the same, intelligent, calculating, burning with hatred even pinned and broken and beaten by his own son.
The black wolf released his throat and stepped back and positioned itself between Erik and the forest. Nowhere to run.
Erik tried to get up. Made it to his hands and knees with blood pouring from his throat and his flanks, steaming where it hit the cold air.
His naked body shook. He looked at me. At the blood on my dress.
At my hands red to the wrists. At the clearing behind me where Klaus’s body lay in the snow with nothing above the neck.
I stood over him and waited for him to understand what he was looking at. A woman he’d hunted, standing upright. A man he’d used, headless in the snow. And his son, his own blood, choosing her.
“Sophia,” I said. “Say her name.”
He spat blood onto the snow between us. “Why should I.”
“Because I’m telling you to.” The Forceweaving crackled around my hands and the air between us got heavy with it. “Say her name.”
His lips curled even now. Even naked and bleeding and beaten. Defiance was all he had left and he wore it like a crown. “Sophia.”
“She was nineteen when you took her. You threatened to kill everyone she loved unless she walked into that forest and she believed you and she went.” I crouched beside him because I wanted him to see my face while I said it.
“She spent two years behind boarded windows while you forced yourself on her and drained her power. And then you killed her.”
“That was an accident ...”
The Forceweaving wrapped around his right hand. I found the first bone in his index finger and I snapped it.
He screamed.
“That was for the first day,” I told him. “Twenty-six more bones in that hand. Seven hundred and twenty-nine more days.”
I broke the second bone. The third. Each one deliberate. I was a healer and I knew the anatomy of the human hand the way I knew the herbs on grandmother’s shelf. Every bone, every joint, every tendon and ligament mapped in my mind. I had used that knowledge my whole life to fix what was broken.
I used it now to break what was whole.
He screamed for the first eight. By the twelfth the screaming thinned to nothing. By the twentieth he’d stopped screaming and was making a thin keening sound that didn’t sound human anymore. Good. He wasn’t human. He’d never been human. Not where it counted.
“This is for every night you forced yourself on her,” I told him while I worked. “Every scream she swallowed. Every mark you left on her skin.”
I moved to the left hand. Started again.
I felt Dietrich standing guard behind me. He wasn’t enjoying this. But he understood it. He accepted it. He knew what this was and he let me do it because it was mine to do.
When both hands were ruined and the fingers were pointing in directions fingers should never point I stood up.
“William,” I said. “My husband. He laughed louder than anyone I ever knew and he brought me flowers from the forest and you tore him apart because he smelled like me.”
Erik’s glazed eyes found mine. “He was in my territory ...”
I pressed the Forceweaving into his ribs. Two cracked. His body convulsed.
“Thomas.” I said it without shaking. I didn’t recognize the sound of myself. “Seven years old. You snapped his neck and left him on my doorstep like a gift.”
“Necessary,” Erik rasped. “To draw you out ...”
Two more ribs. He screamed but there was nothing left in the sound. Just air and pain.
“A child’s murder was necessary,” I repeated.
“Please ...” A bubble of blood on his lips. “Stop ...”
“Sophia said please. Every night for two years. Did you stop?”
He had no answer for that. There was no answer for that.
I stood over him and looked at what he was. This ruined broken thing with blood in his white hair and cruelty in every line of his face. He’d been a monster for so long he’d forgotten he’d ever been anything else. Maybe he hadn’t. Maybe this was all he’d ever been.
“Sophia wrote in the grimoire,” I told him. “Did you know that.”
His eyes changed. Even through the pain and the blood and the ruin of his body something flickered in them. Interest. Hunger. The expectation that he’d mattered enough to fill her pages the way he’d filled her nightmares.
“She filled pages, Erik. Two years of writing. She wrote about the creek breaking in spring and grandmother’s garden after the rain and a recipe for burn poultice because she was scared the knowledge would die with her.
She wrote about wildflowers she could smell through the gaps in the boards.
She wrote about bread from the village bakery that she said she could still remember if she concentrated hard enough. ”
I crouched beside him one last time.
“She wrote about bread, Erik. And not one word about you. Not your name. Not your face. Not a single thing you did to her in two years. You kept her in that cottage and she looked at you and decided you weren’t worth the ink.”
I watched it land. Watched something behind his eyes collapse that the broken bones and the cracked ribs hadn’t been able to touch. He’d kept a woman for two years and she’d erased him while he was still in the room.
“This is for Sophia,” I said. “For the two years you stole. For the songs she stopped singing. For the woman she was before you broke her.”
I reached into his chest with the power. Found his heart. “This is for William. For the flowers he’ll never bring me. For the mornings I woke up alone because you decided he didn’t deserve to live.”
I wrapped the force around the beating muscle and felt it pulse against my grip. Strong. Even now, even broken and begging, his heart beat strong.
“This is for Thomas. For a little boy who called me Auntie and never got to grow up.”
I tightened. The heart stuttered and Erik’s body arched off the ground and a sound came out of him that was beyond screaming.
“And this is for me. For every night I spent afraid. For the noose and the blood and the life you tried to steal.”
I crushed it.
His gaze went wide. Then dark. Then empty.
His body shuddered once. Twice. Then it was still.
I stood over him and watched the life leave. Those eyes turned to glass. The old body collapsed as the last breath left it. Smaller than the wolf had been. Just a man now. Just meat and bone going cold in the snow.
Done.
I hit the snow on my knees and the cold soaked through grandmother’s dress, the white linen soaked with Thomas’s blood and my own and the blood of every man I’d killed today. The embroidered flowers at the collar invisible beneath the red.
The black wolf was beside me before I finished falling. He shifted, quickly, the cracking muffled, the man emerging, and then Dietrich’s arms were around me, his skin warm against my frozen body, his heartbeat slamming against my ribs and through his chest.
“I have you,” he murmured against my hair. “It’s done.”
“Thomas.” The word came out broken. “I saw it coming. Years ago. Before he was even born. I saw it and I told myself it was a lie and I ...”
“You couldn’t have stopped it,” he insisted fiercely, his arms tightening. “Erik was watching. Waiting. He would have found another way.”
“A child,” I whispered. “He killed a child to get to me.”
His grief for the boy he’d never met, tangled with his grief for me and what this day had cost.
I looked at my hands. Red to the wrists. Klaus’s blood. Jakob’s. Erik’s. The men in the forest.
The tears came. Not softly, in great, tearing sobs that shook my whole body.
I cried for Thomas. For Anna. For Sophia under the birch tree.
For William in pieces on the forest floor sixteen years ago.
For the woman I’d been before today, the healer, the herb-woman, the quiet widow who’d lived a small life and asked for nothing except to be left alone.
That woman was dead. She’d died somewhere between the noose and the first kill. What walked out of that clearing was harder. Blood under her nails and a taste for violence that would live inside me forever.
Dietrich held me through all of it. Didn’t try to stop the crying. Didn’t tell me it would be all right. Just held me in the snow with the bond carrying his love into me in a steady current that asked for nothing.
When the sobs stopped, I sat in his arms and breathed and looked at what I’d made.
Blood on the snow. Blood on the trees. Blood on my hands and my dress and the ground in every direction. The clearing looked like something from a war.
But we were alive.
I pressed my ear against Dietrich’s chest. His heartbeat — steady and strong, my Forceweaving still humming in his blood.
“It’s over,” I breathed.
His arms tightened. His lips found the top of my head.
“It’s over,” he confirmed.
Behind the cottage, under the birch tree, Sophia lay in frozen earth. Her monster was dead now. Twenty feet from her grave.
I hoped she knew. I hoped wherever she was, she could feel the weight lifting. The scratch marks on the door finally answered.
“We need to move,” Dietrich murmured after a long time. “Before the cold takes us.”
He was right. We were both bare, him from the shift, me soaked through with blood and snowmelt. He stood first. Pulled me up. We leaned on each other, two broken, bloody people holding each other upright the way we’d been doing since the night he’d carried me out of the forest.
We walked to the cottage. The door was still open, the fire still burning, the warmth reaching through the threshold.
I stopped in the doorway. Looked back one last time at the clearing. The snow. The bodies. The blood on everything, staining the world in a color I’d worn my whole life without understanding what it meant.
I stepped inside and closed the door.
They called me Red for the cloak I wore. Now they’d call me Red for the blood I spilled.