Epilogue #2
“The wolf is part of you. And you are good.” I pulled him closer until our foreheads touched. “This child will know a father who is good. That’s more than you ever had.”
He broke. Not loudly. The tears came and he didn’t try to stop them. His arms went around me and he buried his face against my neck and I held him on that small porch while the sky turned from gold to purple.
I felt him reassembling. Piece by piece. The fear didn’t go away — it wouldn’t for a long time. But the joy came back stronger. Pushing through the cracks.
“A child,” he managed, rough against my neck. “Our child.”
“Our child,” I confirmed.
He pulled back. Looked at my belly. Put his hand there. Spread his fingers wide.
“Can you feel it?” I covered his hand with mine. “Through the bond?”
He closed his eyes. Concentrated. The bond between us opened wider. I felt him searching. Reaching.
“There.” His eyes opened. Amber bright, the wolf looking out with wonder. “Something. Faint. Like an ember that just caught.”
I laughed. First real laugh in weeks. It shook my whole body and made my sore breasts ache and I didn’t care.
“An ember,” I repeated. “That’s our baby.”
His hand stayed on my belly. His eyes stayed on my face.
The bond between us was so wide open I could feel every layer of what moved through him.
Joy first, bright and staggering, the kind that knocks the legs out from under you.
Then fear, cold and sharp, threading through the joy like frost through new grass.
Then something deeper than both. Something that had no name in any language I knew but lived in the place where the man and the wolf met and for once agreed on the same thing.
He pressed his forehead against my belly. Stayed there a long time, breathing.
“I used to think the wolf was a curse,” he whispered into my skin.
“A thing put in my blood to hunt and ruin and destroy. And now it’s on its belly in my chest, whimpering at the sound of something the size of a heartbeat.
” His hands tightened on my hips. “You didn’t just break the curse, Talia.
You turned it into something worth carrying. ”
I put my hands in his hair. Held him there against my belly while the evening turned purple around us and the first stars appeared above the tree line.
“I’m going to be terrible at this,” he warned.
“You’ll be fine,” I assured him. “I’ll show you.”
The echo of the first night — I’ll show you — made something catch in both our chests. We felt the memory at the same time. His shaking hands. My patience. The tears and the tenderness and the beginning of everything.
“You always show me,” he murmured, pressing his lips against my knuckles.
We sat on the porch while the stars came out. His hand on my belly. My head against his shoulder. The bond pulsating between us, carrying three heartbeats now instead of two.
That night I waited until he fell asleep.
The fire had burned low. Embers glowed orange in the hearth. His breathing was deep and even. His dreams drifted into mine — warm ones for once. Soft shapes. The feeling of something small held carefully in large hands.
I slipped out of bed. Pulled the red cloak around my shoulders. Lit a candle and set it on the table.
The grimoire was still under the bed where I’d shoved it. I pulled it out and opened it to the page I hadn’t been able to finish.
Red.
My little Red who pulled the ribbons from my hair.
Who crawled into Mama’s bed and curled against her shoulder and slept with her thumb near her mouth.
Who blushed at everything and laughed too loud and loved with her whole body, arms wide open, heart on the outside of her chest where anyone could reach it.
I did not leave you. I need you to know that. The note was a lie. I left to keep you safe because he said he would come for you and mama if I didn’t, and I believed him. I would walk into a thousand cages for you. I would stay in every one.
You are braver than I was. Stronger. Mama saw it in you before any of us did. She called you Red but she meant fire. She meant the color that burns.
Live, little one. Live so loudly that I can hear you from wherever I am. Love someone who deserves the way you love, wide open, nothing held back, terrifying and beautiful and whole. Have the life I imagined for you on the nights when imagining was all I had.
I am not afraid. I was, for a long time. But I have Mama’s garden and your laugh and the sound of the creek breaking free every spring, and those are enough. Those carry me through the dark places and out the other side.
Your Sophia.
I sat at the table and held the open grimoire against my chest and wept.
Quiet and long and without shame. For the girl who kept her mother’s garden alive inside her own head when everything else had been stripped away.
For the woman who wrote about freedom from a cage and meant every word.
For the aunt who loved me enough to walk through a door she knew would close behind her.
She had found it. Even there. Even in that prison with the boards on the windows and the bar on the door. She had found something Erik couldn’t reach. Couldn’t drain. Couldn’t break.
I wiped my face. Looked at the blank pages waiting after hers.
The book had kept her from me until I was ready. Not until I was powerful enough. Not until I was safe enough. Until I was whole enough to receive what she’d left without being broken by it.
I understood now. That was what ready meant.
Blank pages. Cream-colored and rough at the edges. Left empty by the women who came before me. Waiting for the next blood-keeper to fill them.
I found a quill in the drawer. A pot of ink Dietrich had traded for with a peddler on the eastern road. I dipped the quill. Held it above the first blank page.
What do you write when you’re the first?
The women before me wrote warnings. Survival guides. Instructions for daughters they’d never meet. Every entry in this book was written by someone who expected to die. Who was already dying. Who scribbled what they knew in borrowed time so the next woman might last a little longer.
I wasn’t dying.
I was sitting at a table in a warm cottage with a man I loved sleeping in the next room and a child growing inside me that every generation before mine said was impossible. I had power in my blood and a wolf at my side and a future that stretched forward instead of closing down.
I put the quill to paper.
My name is Talia. They call me Red.
I am a blood-keeper. One in a line of women who carried the old blood and paid the price for it. My grandmother was a blood-keeper. Her mother before her. And back through the years to the first woman who tied a red thread around her wrist and said this is what I am.
I am not the last.
I wrote until my hand cramped around the quill and the ink pot ran low.
I set the quill down. Flexed my stiff fingers. Looked at the pages I’d filled.
It was a start.
Dietrich’s hand landed on my shoulder. Warm. I hadn’t heard him get up.
“Come to bed,” he murmured, still half in a dream.
“I just finished.” I closed the grimoire and pressed my palm flat against the leather cover. Felt all those women who’d written in it before me. Felt Sophia too. Her warmth running under everything else.
“What is it?” He leaned over my shoulder, looking at the closed book.
I looked up at him. His face soft with sleep.
“The beginning,” I told him.
I took his hand and let him lead me back to bed.
I woke up kneeling at Sophia’s grave.
The night wandering had always come from a place deeper than dreaming, a body moving while the self slept somewhere the bond couldn’t reach. Dietrich wouldn’t have felt me leave. Just the absence, when his arm found cold sheets instead of warm skin.
My knees were in the mud. My hands pressed flat against the frozen earth above Sophia’s bones, fingers spread wide like I was trying to reach her through the dirt. My nightgown was soaked through with dew and my feet were bare and numb and the birch tree’s white bark glowed like bone in the dark.
The night wandering. Again.
But the vision was already in me. Already moving behind my eyes.
A woman. Thin. Sick. I couldn’t see her face. Just her hands — bony fingers wrapped around a small black key. Blood on her knuckles. Her own blood. Dripping slow and dark into the stones beneath her feet.
A shape stood behind her. Tall. Still. I couldn’t see it clearly. Just the shape of it in the dark. Just the red where eyes should be.
It was afraid of her.
Then the vision shifted. The woman was somewhere else. A room full of candles that didn’t move. She was kneeling. Touching something on the ground. Something cold. Her lips moved but I couldn’t hear the words.
Her blood hit the floor and the thing in the dark flinched back like she’d thrown fire.
The vision broke apart. Scattered like ash.
I knelt in the mud, shaking. An owl called from the pines. The moon was low above the trees. Sophia’s name carved into the bark above me, the letters deep and familiar under my fingers when I reached up to steady myself.
I didn’t know who the woman was. Didn’t know where or when. My sight never gave those details. Just pieces. Fragments that made no sense until it was too late to change anything.
But I knew what she was. Blood-keeper. I could feel the old blood in her the same way it lived in me.
Except hers was wrong somehow. Sick. Corrupted into something that hurt instead of healed.
Dietrich crashed through the underbrush. He dropped to his knees beside me and pulled me against his chest, his skin burning hot against my frozen body. His panic hit me first. Then relief, then fury at himself for not waking when I’d gotten out of bed.
“I’m here,” I assured him, pressing my cheek against his collarbone. “I’m all right.”
“You were gone.” His arms tightened until I could feel his ribs. “The baby. The cold. You can’t ...”
“I know.” I let him lift me from the mud. Let him wrap me in his shirt. Let him rub warmth back into my hands while Sophia’s grave sat quiet beside us.
The vision was already fading. The woman’s hands. The black key. The blood on the stones. Going soft at the edges the way they always did.
I’d write it down tomorrow. Add it to the grimoire. Leave it for whoever came next.
For now, I let Dietrich lead me home with his arm around my waist and the baby still safe inside me, still burning like the ember he’d felt through the bond.
Outside the cottage, the forest was quiet. Snow melting into streams that ran fast and cold through the undergrowth. Green things pushing through dark earth toward the sun.
Spring had come.