Chapter 34 - Dove
Daylight fades without either of us noticing. Wolf’s bed smells like hearth smoke, the sheets rumpled, the air steeped in that faint wildness that’s all him.
Three days have passed since I started reading the journals. I’ve slept an hour here and there, my body running on caffeine, emotion, and the unbearable ache of everything I’ve seen through those pages.
Wolf made sure I ate, bringing me soup, coffee, and whatever he threw together in the kitchen. But mostly he’s been giving me space, hovering nearby, sketching, or scrolling on his phone.
We haven’t left the island. Hell, we’ve barely left the guest house. Taaq told me to take as much time as I needed. My job will be there when I return.
Jag has been uncharacteristically quiet. He sent a text yesterday telling me not to leave the island, all his usual threats on the surface, but unsettling underneath.
Stay on the island? Why? I expected him to demand the opposite and don’t know what to make of it. Honestly, I don’t have the emotional capacity to dig into whatever mind game he’s playing right now.
The journals lie closed beside me, heavy as coffins, the pages discolored with fingerprints and tear stains.
My eyes sting from reading and crying and not sleeping, but for the first time, I don’t feel like I’m trespassing in Wolf’s pain. I’m part of it now.
I sit cross-legged on his bed, hands slack on my lap. He sprawls beside me, one arm folded under his head, the other resting over his chest. His eyes are open, shadowed, watching the ceiling.
He looks calm in that deceptive way of his, mouth lazy, lids hooded, but the small tics give him away. The flex of his throat, the twitch of his fingers against his ribs, the way he swallows as if it burns going down.
He’s waiting for me to say something.
I don’t know where to start. My head is a burning field of nightmares.
Twenty-three years in the Arctic Circle. Twenty-three years of captivity, abuse, and isolation. Raised like an animal under Denver’s sick perversions. Taught to kill, survive, and shun all hope.
Then the river. The cage without windows. Rhett Howell’s scalpel and the dark.
And finally, Sitka. Six months of learning how to exist among people.
He wrote about his first visit to a grocery store. How he stood in the aisle for thirty minutes, too overwhelmed by choice to buy anything. How Monty had to teach him to cross streets without freezing at the sound of an engine. How technology had both fascinated and terrified him.
He wrote about people as if they were another species. The way strangers stared at him when he forgot to blink. The way laughter in a restaurant felt like gunfire.
He wrote about the day Declan gave him a tattoo machine and told him to try. The trembling in his hands. The vibration reminding him of something awful before it became something healing. Drawing on skin instead of splitting it with a scalpel. Control instead of helplessness.
He found purpose in ink.
Maybe that’s what keeps him tethered. Not sane, but whole enough to be kind. To be human.
For all his darkness, he’s the most colorful person I’ve ever met. His moods swing like the weather, storm one minute, sunlight the next. He talks with his hands, hums while he cooks, and makes faces when he thinks.
He hasn’t told me he cares, but he shows it a hundred sideways ways, by feeding me, teasing me, and guarding my quiet.
For someone who lived his entire life in the dark, he’s the only person I know who tries to make other people feel happy and bright.
But after reading every word in his journal, there’s one thing missing. The trigger that sent him spiraling in the shower.
What happened between him and Jag that day?
I shift on the bed, pulling my knees to my chest. The light from the small lamp drapes a quiet warmth over Wolf’s face, his lashes absurdly black.
“I understand now.” My voice scratches.
“What’s that?” His eyes remain on the ceiling.
“The reason you jumped. I don’t know how you managed to endure as long as you did. You’re a lot braver than I am.”
“Brave is not what that was.”
“You survived hell. Literal, actual hell on Earth.” I stare at my hands. “I don’t even know how to talk about it. I feel like I lived twenty-four years in three days.”
“I hope it doesn’t stick to you, Bluebird. The evil. The soullessness. I don’t want you seeing what I see when I close my eyes.”
“What do you see?”
“The doctor’s ghost. He knows I fear him the most, so he stays.” He taps a finger against his temple.
“Yet you killed him. I think he’s the one afraid of you.”
“You don’t need to fix me.” He looks away, eyes shuttering halfway.
“I’m not trying to fix you. I’m trying to understand you.”
“That’s worse.”
I breathe out a whispered, broken laugh.
“All I’m saying is…” He sighs. “I don’t want you haunted by my little life of horrors. One of us losing sleep over it is enough.”
“And all I’m saying is…” I trace the cover of his journal. “I opened Pandora’s box, and the monsters didn’t fly out. They just lay there, defeated and chopped up. Hardly the apocalypse you promised.”
He snorts a deep laugh, his eyes glimmering. I see love in that stare, but we’re too new for that, the idea of us too uncertain and ill-fated.
If I stay, he dies. That’s my track record with men. The only certainty I have. I can’t lose sight of that.
“I know how hard this was for you.” I gesture at his journal. “You wrote about everything. Your mother, Denver, the doctor, adjusting to civilization, and even things about me.” I pause. “But not Jag.”
His whole body stiffens, rippling tension through the mattress.
“What happened with him?” I ask.
His throat works around something he can’t swallow. The smirk is gone. The black makeup, sequins, and lace all gone, leaving the scarred remains of a man staring into a dark that still answers back.
He rolls onto his side to face me, and his purple robe falls open. A robe I now know belonged to the woman who gave birth to him. The woman he killed when he was only eight because she viciously preyed on his brother.
The fabric parts enough for the lamplight to find him, illuminating his chest. His scars.
I see them differently now. More than the healed-over crosshatching of trauma.
They’re stories written in a knotted weave of threads, some thin and silvery, others bubbled and raised.
A road map of pain that travels from his collarbone, down his ribs, and fades into the shadows beneath the robe.
My throat aches, not from horror but from heartbreak. He doesn’t flinch under my stare, but his eyes flick away, like he’s bracing for disgust or pity.
He won’t find either.
All I want to do is reach out and soothe the hurt with my fingertips. Let him know his past doesn’t scare me. That it doesn’t make him less. That, if anything, it makes him more. Proof of how much life he’s fought to keep.
My hand rises halfway before I stop myself. The fragile space between us shivers. I don’t want to break the spell by asking permission, but I also don’t want to steal something he isn’t ready to give.
When his gaze finally comes back to mine, there’s a flicker there. A question. Maybe an invitation.
“You ever touch a bruise and feel it ache even when it’s healed?” He captures my hovering hand, holding it immobile.
“Yes.”
“That’s what happened with Jag.”
I wait, saying nothing.
“Jag and I…” He regards me like I’m another cliff, another leap. “Your stepbrother pushed me past a line. I didn’t even know where it was until I crossed it.”
My heart beats unevenly. “A line?”
“Between pain and pleasure. Between control and collapse.” He pulls on my hand, flattening my palm against his exposed scars. “Between me being a survivor and the fucked-up freak my abusers created.”
I hold impossibly still.
“Jag made me remember things I didn’t want to remember.” He slowly runs his tongue over his bottom lip, thoughtful. “He made me feel things I didn’t know I could.”
“What did you feel?”
“Desire. Panic. Rapture. All at extreme levels all at once.” He presses my hand harder against his chest. “I thought I was done being anyone’s victim. But he’s not like the men who hurt me. He’s something different. Dangerous in another way.”
“Did he hurt you?”
“No. But he could have, and I would’ve let him.”
My chest squeezes, aching for him. And for the part of me that knows I’ll lose him before I even have him.
He strokes his thumb along the back of my hand. “I had that classy moment in the shower because I didn’t understand my reaction to Jag. Didn’t know if it made me broken or human. I mean, how can I want a man to touch me after I spent my life hating a man’s touch?”
So much to unpack there. I can barely breathe. “Wolf…”
“Don’t say anything yet.” He releases my hand, breaking the contact as he pushes to sit before me. “I need you to know that it’s not simple. Nothing about him or me or what happened is simple.”
I nod. The lump in my throat is too big for words anyway.
“He built a room for me in the tattoo shop.” He goes on to explain how he found Jag with a fever, called in Frankie, and washed him, all of which led to an unexpectedly intimate moment.
“I touched him. Then I kissed him. Then I gave us both a crazy, intense release. Through it all, I refused to let him touch me. How fucked up is that?”
The confession hangs there, human and hurting.
My first reaction isn’t compassion. It’s jealousy. Dark, toxic, and irrational, it burns behind my ribs. I picture Wolf’s beautiful nude body entangled with Jag’s, the man who’s tormented me for years, and it guts me.
But underneath that twisting misery is a quieter, more profound emotion.
Understanding.
If I strip away the jealousy, what’s left is pain. Wolf’s pain, not mine. A boy who never learned the difference between a cruel touch and an affectionate one. A man who’s trying to figure out if desire can ever mean safety.
He watches me as if waiting for judgment, for recoil, and that’s what undoes me completely.
I edge closer, slow enough that he can stop me if he wants.
His breathing stumbles, and his eyes flick down, wary. He expects me to weaponize tenderness.
“You don’t owe me shame for what happened.” I reach out, fingers trembling, and let my hand rest against his chest. “You don’t owe me excuses or explanations. Just the truth. That’s enough.”
His muscles twitch under my palm, but he doesn’t pull away.
The jealousy still simmers, but it’s diluted now, melted into a feral protectiveness that demands I keep him safe from everything that tries to twist love into pain.
I don’t know what we are, but I know what I want.
I want to be the first touch that doesn’t hurt.