Chapter 11
Ilay there watching Sabrina sleep and wondered how to talk to Gabriella.
Early light filled Sabrina’s bedroom in pale stripes that cut across the rumpled sheets, the dried streaks on her inner thighs, the curve of her breast pressed against my chest where the blanket had slipped down sometime during the night.
Her light blonde hair was a mess, spread across the pillow in tangles that suggested my hands had been enthusiastic.
Her lips were parted slightly, one arm curled beneath the pillow, and the bruise on her cheek had darkened overnight to a proper purple that made my jaw tighten every time I looked at it.
My arm was around her waist, fingers resting on the smooth curve of her hip. I closed my eyes. Two sisters. Both of whom I had now been inside. I loved them both, though differently, and more deeply than I’d ever expected. And now they both knew about each other.
And Gabriella had walked in on the evidence.
Sabrina stirred against my chest. A small sound, half-moan, half-sigh, her body shifting, her thigh sliding against mine in a way that sent a jolt through my nervous system that my cock registered with considerably more enthusiasm than the situation warranted.
Her eyes opened slowly, blinking at the light, and the first thing she did was smile.
Soft, sleepy, the smile of a woman who had spent the night being thoroughly loved and was pleased with the results.
Then she saw my face. The smile didn’t vanish.
It adjusted, recalibrated, the way Sabrina’s expressions always did when she was reading a room that had changed while she wasn’t looking.
Her eyes moved over my features, and I watched her process the information: the tension in my jaw, the way I was holding myself too still, the set of my shoulders that she recognized from years of watching me carry things I didn’t want to talk about.
“Hey,” she said. She reached up, her fingers brushing my cheek. “What’s wrong? You look like someone just told you the sky’s falling.”
The sky was fine. The farmhouse, however, had structural issues I hadn’t fully appreciated until five minutes ago. “Gabriella came in,” I said. The words came out flat, matter-of-fact, the way I’d delivered bad news to subordinates during the war. “Earlier. While you were asleep. She saw us.”
The color left Sabrina’s face: a gradual draining, like water seeping from cracked earth, until what remained was pale and still. Her hand, which had been tracing lazy circles on my chest, went very still.
“Did she…” Sabrina swallowed. “Did she understand what she was looking at?”
“She understood completely. She looked…” I searched for the word and found only one that fit. “Hurt.”
Sabrina went quiet. She looked down at the sheet, at her own hands, at the dried evidence on her thighs that had been the final piece of the puzzle for her sister, and something passed across her face that I had seen only a handful of times in our shared life: genuine, unguarded guilt.
“I never wanted to hurt her,” she said. She reached for my hand, her fingers interlacing with mine. “The last thing I wanted was to cause her more pain. She’s been through enough. The bullying, the nightmares… God, I’m such an idiot.”
She didn’t say she regretted last night.
The words hovered in the air between us, unspoken but present, and I was grateful for their absence.
Last night had been necessary. Last night had been real.
The fact that it had also been catastrophic in its timing didn’t change the truth of what had passed between us in that narrow bed.
“What do I do?” she asked, looking at me. “How do I fix this?”
“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “I think we start by getting dressed and going downstairs.”
We dressed in silence. Sabrina pulled on a simple dress, her movements careful, her wings still damaged from yesterday’s bonds.
I found my trousers, pulled on a clean shirt, and tried very hard not to think about the fact that I had now slept with both of Angelina’s daughters, and Angelina was making breakfast downstairs.
We went downstairs. The farmhouse smelled the way it always smelled on good mornings: bread, cider and cheese.
The difference was the absence of a third body at the table, the empty chair where Gabriella should have been, and the quality of silence that suggested someone had left in a hurry and taken all the easy conversation with them.
Angelina stood at the stove. She turned when she heard our footsteps, a wooden spoon in one hand, and I watched her read the room.
Her eyes moved from me to Sabrina. Noted the careful distance between us.
Noted the bruise on Sabrina’s cheek, cleaned and salved.
Noted the absence of Gabriella. Noted the set of my shoulders that she recognized from the years when I came home with letters I didn’t want to read.
She set the spoon down, turned fully toward us, one hand on her hip, and the expression on her face was the one she wore when something serious could no longer be danced around.
“What is going on?” she asked.
Sabrina opened her mouth but quickly closed it. Instead, she looked at me.
“Gabriella’s upset,” I said. Which was the least informative sentence I had ever constructed, and from the way Angelina’s eyebrow lifted, she agreed with the assessment.
“About?”
“It’s complicated,” Sabrina said.
Angelina’s eyes held mine for a long moment.
Then Sabrina’s. Then the empty chair. Then back to me, and whatever she saw in that exchange, she kept to herself.
She didn’t push. She didn’t need to. The concern was already there, written across her features in the lines that only appeared when her children were hurting and she couldn’t quite reach the source.
“Eat,” she said. “Both of you. The bread’s getting cold, and cold bread is a tragedy I refuse to participate in before eight in the morning.”
We ate. The bread was perfect, warm and soft and entirely wasted on two people who were chewing mechanically and tasting approximately nothing.
Angelina moved between stove and table, her wings flexing with each turn, and the silence she maintained wasn’t the silence of someone who had given up.
It was the silence of someone who was listening, who was collecting data, who was putting pieces together with the patience of a woman who had raised two daughters through a war and helped raise one stray boy besides and knew that some truths arrived on their own schedule.
I caught her watching me once, her hazel eyes steady, and the look she gave me contained no judgment, just concern.
* * *
I found Gabriella in the vegetable garden behind the chicken coop, on her knees in the dirt with a trowel in one hand and a cluster of uprooted weeds in the other, and the sight of her there, working alone with the focused intensity of someone using manual labor as emotional armor, made my stomach sink.
She didn’t look up when I approached. Her dark blonde hair was pulled back in a loose knot, strands escaping to stick to her damp temples in the morning heat.
Her shoulders were set in that straight line I recognized from childhood, the posture she adopted when she was determined not to show whatever she was feeling.
The potion’s effects were still there if you knew where to look, but they were buried under something fresher and heavier, the stillness of a person who had been handed a truth they weren’t prepared for and was now processing it one weed at a time.
From the corner of my eye, I saw Angelina at the water pump, her hand on the handle, her gaze fixed on us.
I stopped at the edge of the vegetable row.
Close enough to talk, far enough that she had room to breathe.
The chickens clucked in their coop behind us, oblivious, and somewhere above a skybird called in that long, descending note that usually sounded peaceful and today just sounded like the sky rubbing it in.
“Gabriella,” I said.
She kept digging. The trowel bit into the soil with more force than the task required, and a clump of earth went flying past my boot.
“I’m not mad at you.”
Her voice surprised me. She set the trowel down and sat back on her heels, brushing dirt from her palms, and when she finally looked at me her eyes were clear and steady and wounded.
“I’m not mad,” she said again. “I just wish you’d told me.
Instead of letting me walk in and… find you like that.
With her. With the evidence still on her.
” She swallowed, and I watched her throat work.
“That part hurt, Gabriel. The finding out part. Not the… the fact that it happened. Though that’s complicated too.
But the way I found out. That’s the part that sits wrong. ”
The honesty of it landed like a physical thing, just the raw, undecorated truth of how she felt, delivered in a voice that asked for nothing except to be heard.
I’d faced down harpy raiders with less fear than I felt standing in that vegetable row with dirt on my boots and Gabriella’s hurt eyes on my face.
“It happened fast,” I said. “The rescue. The fear. She was… God, Gabriella, she was tied up in a skyboat with a bruise on her face and they’d hurt her skybird and she asked me to stay with her and then we were…
” I stopped, searched for the right phrasing, and found nothing that wouldn’t sound like an excuse.
“I didn’t plan it. Any of it. With either of you.
It just… happened. And then kept happening.
And I’m not sorry it happened, but I am sorry you found out the way you did. That part’s on me. Completely.”
She listened, the way Gabriella always did, her eyes never leaving my face, taking in the words and the spaces between them with the attention of someone who had spent a lifetime learning to read the truth in silences.
After a moment, she nodded, a small downward dip of her chin that acknowledged the explanation without necessarily forgiving it.