Chapter 37 Chloe
CHLOE
When I stir awake, I can tell something’s different. At first, I think the power has come back on, because the house feels more alive somehow. And warmer, too.
But when I sit up from where I was curled up on the floor, the electric clock on the mantel is still dark. I crawl over to the couch and fumble for the lamp switch. Nothing happens.
So why isn’t it freezing in here?
A footstep thuds behind me, and I jerk my head around to find Theo standing in the entrance to the living room. He’s changed his clothes, and it looks like he might have taken a shower, too. There’s no trace of filth left on him.
Plenty on me, though. From what we did.
I rip the blankets away and find I’m still naked underneath, dirt and blood streaking my skin. Warm air settles over my shoulder.
“What’s going on?” I ask.
Theo points to the picture window, still covered by the curtain. But I realize I hear something. A low, mechanical rumbling.
“What’s that?” I sweep up one of the blankets and wrap it around me, more to hide my nakedness than to keep warm. Theo gives me a shy, pleased-looking smile, and something about it makes my heart tremble.
He’s a monster, I tell myself, as if I didn’t just fuck him for hours. Willingly.
I cut across the living room and drag back the curtain. The first thing I notice is the snow—piles and drifts of it, like what happens up north, all bright white and untouched. The sky is grey with early dawn, but the snow itself seems to glow.
Then I see the generator.
When I turn around to look at Theo again, he’s standing right behind me. I jump, startled, and he smiles again.
“Found it in one of the empty houses,” he says. “No one was using it there.”
Yeah, no one was using it because everyone fled because he murdered five fucking people. I don’t say that, though.
“It’s running the heater,” I say instead. “Isn’t it?” I realize I can hear that too: a soft, constant hum in the background. I think that’s what woke me up. What made the house feel alive.
Theo nods. “It’s not strong enough to power everything, but I thought the heater was the most important.”
He signs more quickly than he did earlier, and I’m six months out of practice. But I still manage to get all of it.
We stare at each other. I tug the blanket around my shoulders, trying to decide what to say.
My entire body is aching, and I know it’s not from the cold.
My heart is aching, too, and I don’t know if it’s from his kindness or from the fact that I let myself give in to him the second he walked through my door.
That I begged him to fuck me even though I’m supposed to hate him.
“Thank you,” I finally say, the words stiff. Then, half-heartedly, I sign it, too.
“I don’t mind if you talk,” Theo says. He holds his hands still for a second, then adds, “I like the sound of your voice. I missed it.”
I jerk my gaze to meet his eyes, as bright and piercing as the snow. “Missed it?” I echo.
“While I was underground.” He tilts his head. “Do you know about that?”
My chest tightens, and I pull away from the curtain, back toward the center of the living room, where the fire is still casting a dim pool of orange light. “Yeah,” I say. “My friend Penelope, she told me that’s how you—how you come back.”
Theo’s footsteps thud against the floor. So he can make noise when he wants to. He puts his hand on my shoulders until I look over at him.
“Yes,” he says. “I’m aware, when I’m dead. Sort of.” His eyes gleam. “Usually, all I think about is the void. But this time, I thought about you.”
My breath lodges in my throat and wobbles there. My eyes feel heavy.
“Why?” I whisper.
In response, Theo reaches over and brushes his hand over my hair, lank and greasy from three days without power or a proper bath. God, none of that occurred to me when he was fucking me into unconsciousness. Mostly because I wasn’t thinking about anything. Just—him.
Now, with the heat on, the storm over, and some semblance of a civilization seeping back into my home, it’s all I can think about.
“The hot water is working,” he says. “Would you like a bath?”
Heat flushes into my cheeks. Can Hunters read minds? No, not like that. I didn’t think.
“Did you take one?” I ask.
He nods.
“It would be nice.” I don’t move to do it, though.
There’s something lodged between us right now, and I don’t know what to make of it.
I saw this man drenched in blood. I saw the bodies he left behind, smelled the viscera staining the inside of those houses.
I smelled the inside of his body, layered with cordite from the shotgun.
I know he’s a monster. I know it.
And yet all I can feel is a warm, strange gratefulness. That he went out into the cold and brought me a generator. That he thought of me while he was dead. Or half-dead. Or whatever the fuck he was.
He still orphaned Oliver, though.
“You’re upset.” His hands speak, but his face is unreadable.
“Yes,” I breathe out. “Can you even understand why?”
Something darkens across his features, and he jerks back a little, and I think I might have hurt him. Is such a thing even possible?
He makes the sign he did earlier, kill and moon.
“Do you mean the murders?” I snap.
Theo’s expression turns steely. “Not murders,” he says. “I’m not human.”
My confusion hardens, then, into fear. “Excuse me?”
“A murder would be if I killed another of my kind.” His eyes are cold as his hands flash out his words. “But I didn’t. I killed humans. Three of them hurt another human, that I—” He stops, and I bite down on my tongue to keep tears from spilling out along my lash line. “That I care about.”
I feel dizzy. “Oliver, you mean.”
“They didn’t hurt you, did they?”
I blink. For a moment, I don’t understand what he means. And then I do.
“You care about me,” I breathe.
Theo gestures toward the window. Toward the generator, as if that answers the question.
Except maybe it does. He dug himself out of the ground exactly how Penelope said he would, and the first place he came to was me.
And although I’ve tried so hard to stop them, the tears finally spill over, streaming down my face in long, hot rivers.
I suck in a shuddery breath and squeeze my eyes shut, and all I want to do is cry—it’s all too much, how I was trapped in the cold and the dark and then it’s Theo, a fucking killer, who brings me warmth.
He wraps his arms around me, pulling me up to his chest. I sob into his flannel shirt, and he strokes his hand over my hair, soft and gentle, with not a single trace of violence.
And I let him, because it feels good to be held like this.
To be held by him like this. To know he didn’t really abandon me after all.
Theo lifts my chin, forcing me to look at him. “I’m sorry I made you cry,” he says. “I’m not going to kill you.”
His brow is furrowed, his expression serious and concerned and a little confused, as if he thinks the only reason I might be crying is because I think he’s going to murder me.
“I don’t—” The words come out all jagged, and so I try to sign them instead. “I don’t think you’re going to kill me.”
“Then why?” He finishes the question by wiping some of my tears away with his big, rough fingers.
I take a deep breath, considering all the ways I could answer that. “It’s too much,” I finally sign, and Theo tilts his head, his confusion clear.
“I missed you.” My hands shake. “And I was furious with you, with what you did.” I look up at him, and I tell him the truth. “I hated you,” I say. Out loud.
He doesn’t react, not really. I expect hurt in his eyes, but there’s nothing.
“But now that you’re here, I—I know I didn’t. Not really.” My tears spill again, and I press my face into his chest again, and he squeezes me tight. “I don’t know how this can work,” I say into his shirt, each word releasing his scent. “You’re a—you’re not human.”
Theo tilts my chin up with his finger. I stare at him through the veil of my tears, and somehow, I feel lighter. Because I found the truth of things, I realize. I want him, but how can I have him when we aren’t the same? At all?
Theo tightens his jaw. Brushes his fingers over my cheek again, drawing away more of my tears.
“It can’t work,” I whisper. “You’ll have to keep doing—that.”
“Killing,” he says.
“Yes!” I step away from him and draw the blankets tighter around my shoulders. “You’re a murderer! You kill people, and when you die, you come back to life! When I die, I’ll be dead forever!”
The words explode out of me, and with a kind of soft, squeezing horror, I realize—
That’s the real truth of things. It isn’t that he kills. It’s that he’ll never die.
Theo stares at me for a long time. Then he lifts one hand and folds his fingers slowly into a very familiar shape—one of the first signs I learned, even before I started my major in college. Everyone knows it. Kids learn it in elementary school.
“I love you.”
I suck in my breath and take another step backward. He doesn’t drop his hand, just keeps it there, letting me see it, like he wants me to know it’s not a mistake. His eyes are wide and pleading. Almost desperate.
“You can love?” I whisper.
Maybe it’s the wrong thing to say. Or maybe not. Theo drops his hand and slumps his shoulders a little, his eyes never leaving mine. “Yes,” he says. “It’s different, but I know what it means to love someone.”
I pull on the blankets, my body shaking.
“I wanted Oliver to go with you,” he says, his signs crisp and his eyes blazing. “I wanted Oliver to have a mom like I had. A mom who loves him.”
I feel dizzy.
“His dad would be a killer,” Theo says, “but so was mine.”
My tears brim up again. “It doesn’t work that way.”
“Why not?”
I open my mouth, try to find the answers. There aren’t any.
“Oliver came to me for help,” Theo signs, the movements growing faster.
“He was hurt. I didn’t hurt him.” He shoves his thumb against his chest. “They did.” He doesn’t use the general sign for they but instead points off to the left, toward Oliver’s house.
“I wanted to save him.” His movements are sharp.
“I wanted to save you. Why can’t I do that? Why can’t I save someone I love?”
I sway in my spot until the blankets slide away from my shoulders.
I think of Penelope’s sister, how grateful I was when she stopped that man in Miami from hurting us.
How she swept in so cleanly and calmly and slid the knife between his ribs as if she were plucking up a spider that had set me and her sister to screaming.
It had been nothing to her to take that man’s life.
It terrified me. But I was still grateful.
And when I look up at Theo, at his steely eyes, his firm mouth, I realize he had done the same for Oliver.
He would do the same for me.
“You can,” I whisper. “But it’s still not how things work.” I swallow, my throat dry. “For humans.”
“It’s how things work,” he says, “for Hunters.”
I nod. Then I fall into him again, letting the blanket drop to the floor. He pulls me into him, buries his nose in my filthy hair, and breathes it in like it smells sweet. I don’t know what to make of any of this. What any of it means. All I know is I don’t want him to leave my side.
“I’m going to take a shower now,” I whisper. “Come with me.”
He responds by scooping me up in a bridal carry, and I cling to him, shivering. It can’t be from the cold. It’s not cold in here. Not anymore, thanks to him.
Theo carries me into the closest bathroom. It’s one I never use, but right now, it’s still damp from his own shower, and I wonder if that should bother me, him using it and creeping around my house while I was asleep.
No. It doesn’t.
He turns on the water and lets it run until it’s steaming.
I peel his flannel shirt back, and I don’t have to say anything, because he strips off the rest of his clothes.
It’s dim in the bathroom, the little window above the toilet letting in grey, snowy light, but I take him in, this towering, strong body I had not allowed myself to think about except in the darkest parts of the night, when my hand would creep between my legs.
“Thank you,” I whisper, and I don’t know what I’m thanking him for, not really. Maybe it’s just being here.
He smiles at me in that small way he does, and then he takes my hand and helps me into the spray of water. It’s shockingly hot, almost scalding, and after two days without electricity, I’ve forgotten what real heat feels like.
I tug him in after me, and he drags the curtain shut and then pulls me up to him for a kiss.
It’s not like yesterday, when we didn’t kiss so much as devour each other.
It’s slow, measured, careful. He runs his hand down the side of my throat, skims it along my arms, and rests it on my hips.
I shift until I feel his cock press into my thigh.
Then I wind my arm around his neck and squeeze his wet hair up in my fingers.
He said he loved me.
Right now? In this moment?
I think I might love him, too.
And that scares the fuck out of me.