Epilogue
Elias
Twenty minutes would have been enough. Fifteen, if she panicked and forgot everything I taught her. Ten, if she followed the old forestry track because city people have an almost religious faith in paths created by man.
Leah demanded thirty.
I can’t believe we’re fucking doing this now.
I still remember Henrik and Anders appearing at my door the first time, wearing the expressions of men who knew they had fucked up, to tell me the Hunt was underway – but that they had lost the bride. In the fucking mountains. Leah was terrified and unprepared, thinking she had been taken again.
I almost put both of them through the bloody wall.
This evening, though?
She is the one demanding the head start. Setting the rules. Waiting for me to come after her.
Before she was let loose, she smiled at me as though she knew precisely what the additional time would do to me.
And this time, every part of the Hunt belongs to her.
No masks or hands dragging her places. She chose the route.
She set the boundaries. She took the red piece of yarn that ends everything the moment she removes it from her wrist.
The second hand passes the final mark on Anders’ watch.
He holds the leather cover away from its face. ‘Almost.’
I don’t move. If I do, I’ll lose my cool and make mistakes.
Planting both feet in the frost-stiff grass, I listen to the crunch of the soil and the rustle of the trees.
Around me, the clearing lies beneath an iron-grey sky.
Yellow birch leaves tremble along the lower slope, and rowan berries burn red between the dark spruce.
Early October smells of wet leaves, mushrooms and earth turning towards winter.
There’s a brittle crust of frost that lingers where the sun has failed to reach. By midday tomorrow, it should be gone.
And by midday tomorrow, Leah will be my wife.
In every way that matters.
I don’t have to grip this thought hard enough to keep it. Because certainty holds it tethered instead. She will stand beside me because she chose to, knowing exactly what I am and everything I have been.
It almost feels like a small miracle.
I glance towards the edge of the path ahead.
It should comfort me that there’s no snow. Unlike last year, when the early blizzards smiled upon me ahead of season and trapped her in my paws.
‘Jakob,’ Anders prompts, continuing in Norwegian. ‘Five minutes.’
I look towards the place where Leah disappeared between the trees. Nothing but damp and indifferent woodland stretching towards the ridge.
Jakob. The name that belongs to these mountains. The name I used to prefer being called by until Leah walked into my life and fixed all the crooked angles of the one my father had given me.
The old rage comes. I clench one hand, hold it there, then let my fingers open again to banish it away from me.
Anders mistakes it for preparation.
‘Eyes on the red,’ he reminds me. The red tied around Leah’s wrist. She can tie it to a branch. Hold it above her head. Walk towards any one of the people stationed around the agreed perimeter.
One signal and the Hunt ends – she knows it. They made her repeat it twice. The second time, she just looked at me. Did not repeat it.
That smirk she sneaked my way when they expected her to say it—
She wouldn’t. End the Hunt. End everything we’ve become.
‘No dogs,’ Olle says from beside the fire with a grin too wide to be kind.
He says it as if I’d forgotten Brute screaming from inside Anders’ shed while Menace clawed at the locked door. The pair would find Leah in minutes and spend the rest of the morning expecting praise for ruining a silly family tradition.
I take the first step.
‘No weapons,’ Henrik adds.
My gaze cuts to him as the image of the hatchet stolen from the cabin comes to mind. That day she fought me in the snow. When the frost took hold of her lashes and the cold spread a delicate crimson over her cheeks.
When I almost took her.
Henrik raises both hands. ‘I see you have none.’
‘Then why say it?’ I growl, barely able to recognise my own voice.
‘Because you look like you want to murder something.’
I take a deep breath and decide against educating him in the ways of my demons.
My mouth opens when Markus shifts beside his brother. A stupid grin paints his face a shade of too-young-to-get-me, and he’s foolish enough to enjoy this.
‘He always looks like that,’ he says.
When I was his age, I contemplated darker things than chasing a would-be bride across the forest grounds.
I glare until he looks away first.
A chuckle travels from behind me, dragging my attention.
I don’t turn to locate its owner – there are too many relatives here, and sorting the guilty from the merely irritating would waste my time.
Behind me, the whole ridge looks as though my family has decided a wedding requires occupying the entire damn mountain.
Anders’ gloved hand closes briefly over my shoulder. The contact is heavy and familiar. It still takes effort not to shrug him off.
‘She chose this,’ he says, undoubtedly recognising the lingering unease I can’t seem to shake. ‘She wanted to do it the way it used to be done here.’
Instead of explaining that my plans for the ceremonial portion are becoming increasingly unceremonious the longer he keeps me here, I simply give a nod.
I know she chose it.
The other night, she came to me with that vicious brightness in her eyes, and the red strip already looped around her wrist.
‘We are doing the Hunt the right way,’ she said.
Telling her no only made her taunt me with my ‘deteriorating hunting skills’.
‘Manipulation is unattractive,’ I reminded her, and she reminded me right back that lying was a sin in any religion known to man.
Then she climbed onto my lap, wrapped the red wool around my wrist and whispered that she wanted to see my face when I caught her.
I. Did. Not. Sleep.
Every time I closed my eyes, she was moving through the trees ahead of me. Breathless, flushed, looking over her shoulder with fear she chose to feel.
That distinction should make me feel less corrupt.
Does it?
‘She chose this,’ Anders repeats.
‘I heard you,’ I snarl, but check myself before I make it worse.
He grins at me. He was never in my shoes. He can’t know what this is doing to me.
‘Make sure you continue hearing it,’ he adds. He wants assurance that I know when the pursuit is supposed to end.
My jaw locks. The silver-haired man across from me holds my gaze without fear.
‘Time to get your woman,’ he says, flipping the stopwatch closed.
I give him a solemn nod.
And I enter the trees.
The clearing disappears within twenty rapid steps.
Sound changes first. The low voices of my kin fade behind spruce and damp earth. Branches interlock overhead, cutting the fading light into grey fragments.
Water ticks from green needles. Somewhere to my left, a stream moves over stone with a subtle murmur. Like nature gossiping about what dirty things I might have planned for my woman.
Leah’s trail begins badly, but it’s a deliberate choice.
A fern is bent beside a root, mud holding the clear edge of her boot where she stepped too heavily. Three metres ahead, something in lilac catches against rough bark.
Lilac, not red.
I pinch it free. Wind it once around my finger before sense catches up with what I am doing.
‘Childish,’ I murmur. She has left her hairband. To rattle me.
She ties her hair back before entering the woods because she has spent enough mornings cursing branches to develop basic survival instincts.
The band is bait.
I bring it to my nose and close my eyes like a man on death row.
Soap made of berries. Smoke from the cabin. The faint floral scent of the oil Sunna gave her.
Leah’s scent.
Heat feathers low in my abdomen with such violence I have to straighten and force it back under control by merely breathing.
She chose this.
She knows the way home.
I repeat the facts silently while following the next mark.
Her trail angles north-west, away from the stream and into denser spruce. She avoids the open space between two stones, shortens her stride and tests the earth before placing her weight.
She learnt.
When we first returned to the cabin after England, she attacked every rise. I caught her every time. Bent her over each one before she reached the top and made her drive my name into the soil until it etched itself into the soul of the world. My name. In her voice.
Now she studies that same ground.
The pride rising through me is entirely indecent. Sunna taught her what could feed her or poison her. Anders taught her to read the mountains. But the way she moves when she believes danger follows?
That is mine.
Rotten at the root. But mine.
I hear her boots beyond a fallen trunk, the faint hitch that enters her stride when she tires, as familiar to me as my own heartbeat.
The sound stops. My eyes fall to the ground. No tracks continue across the pine needles. At their edge, one boot print lies over another, the second tip scuffed back towards me. She doubled back.
She’s playing with me.
A branch snaps somewhere to my left. As I turn towards it, I hold my breath and let the silence become enough to satisfy the demon in me.
I move.
Seven steps. Eight.
My feet halt beside a stream and I crouch when I see a sliver of fabric in the distance.
A smile pulls at my mouth.
She stays hidden behind a trunk long enough for confidence to loosen her next step.
I remain where I am, head lowered, while she eases out from cover and moves deeper between the trees. Her rhythm is careful at first, then quicker when distance gives her the assurance she needs.
A vicious something unfurls within me. I lower my head further because the smile is already there, pulling too wide at my mouth.
She’s beautiful.
I wait.
Wait…
Until the forest claims her.
The stream conceals me as I circle around, wet moss accepting my boots without protest. The wind comes at me, carrying her scent through timber and leaves.