Chapter 31 - Dove
The night exhales a mournful hush that feels borrowed from a church. Pine leans into the wind as the little guest house breathes around us, a soft rib cage of wood and light.
The kitchen still smells like heat, lemon butter clinging to steam and the scent of dill floating in the air. The dinner Wolf made sits warm in my stomach, sending pulses of comfort through a body that clenches and shivers with arctic horrors.
He fed me before we started. Because he knew. That’s so him. Haunted, damaged, but so stubbornly protective that he would never let me follow him into hell on an empty stomach.
What he suffered is more unfathomable than anything I imagined. And this is only a glimpse.
He started his story on the edge of a cliff. He spread his arms, let go, and hit the river, taking me with him. Death should’ve been the end, but instead it delivered him into worse hands.
For ten months.
Ten months alone, in a cage, without the mercy of light. He wrote about his conversations with Regret, the visits from the doctor with a heart of frost, the scalpel, the blood, and the depth of pain that didn’t stop when the blade lifted.
My throat burns. I can’t scrub the images from my head. Wolf shackled, stripped, bleeding, but still spitting sarcasm through grinding teeth. A boy raised in hell, dragged back into hell, and still too stubborn to die.
I want to scream. I want to put my hands on the walls and rip the world apart for letting that happen to him. I want to do things that would shame the devil who hurt him.
Violence. That’s what his story inspires in me. I’m so angry for him. So fucking angry.
Instead, I look at him. Really look. The makeup-stained eyes, the pout, the theatrics, the necessary mask that prevents others from seeing what he carries under his skin.
But I see it now. There’s so much more. The steel braided into his bones. The fight that kept him alive when lesser men would’ve curled up and died.
He thinks he’s broken. He thinks he’s a lonely, lost boy. But all I see is ferocity. He isn’t fragile. He isn’t some tragic fallen angel stumbling through an expression of self-destruction.
He’s a survivor.
Not just a survivor of captivity but of a lifetime of it. Of whatever Denver did to him. Of unspeakable hardships in the hills. Of every scar branded on his body long before the doctor touched him.
He feels me looking and lifts his head. “Welcome to my freak show.”
“Wolf.”
“If I don’t make jokes about it, who even am I?”
“You don’t have to do that with me. No pretense. No judgment. No masks between us.” My chest feels so tight it’s hard to breathe. “Why did you jump?”
“For that, you need to meet Denver. Frankie introduces him best.” He plucks the book from my lap and replaces it with hers. “Need a break? Bathroom? Booze…?”
I’m already shaking my head, eyes glued to Frankie’s journal. No way in hell am I stopping now. I’m strung between dread and fascination, terrified of what I’ll find and starving for it anyway.
His fingers hook beneath my chin, gentle but unyielding, coaxing my face up until I stare into his stormy blue eyes.
“You’ve been reading for hours.” He examines my pupils, the tremor in my hands, the stiffness in my shoulders, every small tell he’s learned to read. “You don’t have to keep going tonight. You can sleep. Eat something. Breathe.”
I can’t. Not yet.
Swallowing hard, I refuse to look away, refuse to let him see how much his past has shaken me. After a too-long moment, he sighs, and a soft, sad look passes over his face.
“Okay.” He lets go, fingertips trailing from my chin as if reluctant to lose contact. “We’ll read together, and when you want to stop, say stop. If you want to know more, ask. If you want to skip, we’ll skip. If you want to throw the book at my head, aim for the soft parts. Deal?”
“Where are the soft parts?”
He presses his soft, warm lips against my mouth, slowly flicks his tongue, and leans back.
“Oh.” I pull in a breath and nod.
The spine creaks as he opens Frankie’s book. Her handwriting fills the first page, a looping scrawl that looks nothing like his.
He runs his thumb down the margin and begins to read.
“They say obedience is survival. Staying silent is proof you don’t want more than your share of air.
Obedience is the only language Denver respects.
The moment you make a sound, you give him something to take.
I learned that lesson on the first day when he took my unborn baby. ”
The hairs along my arms lift. Wolf’s growly tone is a tool he doesn’t wield often. Every word rasps like it’s been rusting in his throat for years, scraped clean to reach me. The gravelly ache in it makes the story hurt worse, makes it more real.
He glances at me like an apology.
I expel a breath and gesture at the book. “May I?”
At his stiff nod, I read aloud.
I read through the first forty-two days of Frankie’s chilling captivity. I read until she finds bones.
Human bones.
And what does she do?
She collects them in a bag of blueberries and dumps the morbid pile onto Denver’s dinner. She feeds him his own damn ghosts.
You go, girl.
But as she warned in her opening sentence, defiance has a cost. In this case, kin punishment.
Denver pinned Kody’s hand to the table. With a fillet knife. That explains his stigmata-like scar.
Frankie details how the handle trembled from Kody’s pulse, how the sound he made wasn’t human, and how she would’ve traded her soul to take his pain instead.
I look up at Wolf, and he’s watching me, silent, expression chiseled from stone, but I can see the flicker of old anguish.
“Is it true?” My voice cracks. “The bones? The knife? All of it?”
“Yeah. She was trying to survive. Trying to fight him the only way she could.”
“A fillet knife?” I blink hard, a tear breaking loose and sliding down my cheek. “That’s why Kody’s hand is scarred? It was a punishment for something he didn’t do?”
“That was Denver’s way.”
“Holy shit.” My fingers quiver. “And the women, the ones before her, he killed them?”
“You’ll get to that part.” His voice lands roughly, carrying too many scars. “Let’s call it a night.”
“No.” I grip the book tighter. “I can’t stop now.”
“You should.” He leans back, watching me as if measuring how close I am to breaking. “You’ve read enough for one night.”
“I haven’t. You lived it. The least I can do is finish it.”
“You don’t need those pictures in your head, Lovey-dovey.” He frees a heavy sigh. “Trust me.”
“Too late. They’re already there.”
His eyes search mine. Whatever he sees makes his shoulders drop.
“You don’t get used to it.” He reaches out and brushes the tear from my cheek with his thumb. “No matter how much time passes. You just learn where to hide the parts it ruined.”
I study his face, the tension behind his eyes, the faint tremor in his jaw. He doesn’t want to live through it again tonight. He already did it once today, reading it for the first time.
“You don’t have to stay up with me.” I close the book partway, thumb marking the page.
“You’re not stopping?”
“I won’t sleep until I finish it. But you should. Sleep.”
Relief flickers across his expression. Maybe gratitude. Maybe both. “You sure?”
“Lie down, right here, if the light doesn’t bother you. I’ll read quietly.”
He hesitates for a heartbeat, then exhales, tension draining from his shoulders. He lowers himself onto his side on the couch, carefully, as if testing the idea of comfort. His head finds my lap, and before I can second-guess it, my fingers weave through his hair.
It’s so soft and shaggy, damp with the remnants of salt air, curling against my palm. He hums low in his throat, eyes slipping closed.
“My favorite pillow,” he murmurs against my thigh, voice already fading.
“Sleep, Wolf.”
He does. Slowly, his breathing deepens, and his weight settles into me. I absently comb through the dark mess of his hair, the movement hypnotic and grounding. His fingers twitch once against my leg but never lift.
I open the journal again. The pages whisper.
The secrets. The mystery. The unexpected love blooming in Frankie. Love for three feral men who bullied her, kept her in the dark, and protected her from Denver and one another.
Why? Frankie’s word bleeds into the next lines. Why did Denver abduct me? Why didn’t Monty come home? Why won’t they tell me what they’re hiding?
My pulse hammers in time with her questions. They’re my questions, too. The why of everything. The madness. The lies. The secrecy that binds them all.
As I read the shift in her words, I feel a sharp coldness open in my chest. Her handwriting grows unsteady and desperate as she writes about the night I knew in my gut was coming.
The night Denver tied her to the bed.
The Glasgow smile painted on Wolf’s face.
The devil’s bargain.
Vital pieces inside me break cleanly, audibly. I hear them snapping, falling away permanently.
The man who raised Wolf hurt him in the most unthinkable way. The betrayal. The damage. It’s a wonder Wolf can function at all.
Tears smudge everything, and I press a hand to my mouth, trying to keep quiet, but the sob crawls out anyway.
God, Wolf.
My throat closes. The room shrinks, and the air becomes unbreathable. I can’t look away from the page, even when the tears splash onto the ink.
Someone else cried on these pages, the dried splotches making some parts hard to decipher. Am I reading through Monty’s tears? Wolf’s?
Fucking hell, this hurts.
I keep going, the letters blurring, the ache in my chest insufferable. Wolf stirs but doesn’t wake, his breath warm against my thigh. I drag my fingers through his hair again, careful not to wake him.
He survived this. They all did. But now I understand what it cost.
Wolf made a deal with the devil to protect Frankie. Then she sacrificed herself to protect him and his brothers. She promised to give Denver anything, everything, if he never hurt his sons again.
My eyes burn, the pages swimming.
Jag triggered Wolf’s breakdown in the shower. Whatever happened between them was sexual. If Wolf has only ever known abuse, his reaction to Jag makes sense.
It breaks my fucking heart.
As I sit there, tears streaking down my cheeks, with Wolf’s head resting on my lap and his scars hidden beneath my fingertips, I realize the truth that Frankie didn’t write.
Sometimes survival isn’t proof of strength.
It’s proof of love.
If only I could apply that truth to my own past.