Chapter 22
Twenty-Two
Avery
A shifter killed him.
Gwyn’s face drained of color. “What?”
Avery’s chest constricted, the panic coming back in full force. The room blurred in and out as memories crashed over her, the grief lashing her with a fresh wound.
Her mother rested her glass on the table. She told her it had been a heart attack. That he died in his sleep peacefully. Instead, he died frightened, in pain, fucking alone, bleeding out somewhere.
“Avery.” Wren reached for her.
She jerked back from the table, chair legs scraping against the wood. She stood, head dizzy. “You knew. You both knew, and you kept it from me.”
“You were young.”
“Bullshit, I was older than Gwyn was.” Avery turned toward her sister. For once, Gwyn was silent, looking down at her plate.
Her mother clucked her tongue, as if she was being defiant, as if she was being irrational like a child throwing a tantrum.
“Sit down, we’re not finished.”
“What else is there to talk about?” Avery spat out.
Wren chimed in. “We don’t know that a shifter killed him,” she said almost quietly. “His body was never found.”
Avery gaped, flickers of hurt piercing her already tender heart. “What did we bury then?” Her voice cracked, tears bleeding into her eyes as she slumped back in her seat.
“An empty casket.” Her mother’s voice was flat as she picked cat hair off the table.
Avery’s nails dug into her palms. “How do you know he’s dead?”
“Our intelligence suggests he is.” She stated it like it didn’t matter that her husband could be somewhere out there. Her father.
“But—”
“Avery,” she said. Her eyes snapped up to Avery’s, the finality in her tone brutal. “If your father were alive, he wouldn’t have left you to grieve for the last year.”
A bitter smile pulled at Avery’s mouth, the tears finally falling.
She got up from the table, not bothering to look back as she stormed out of the room.
The hallway blurred. Her teeth sank into her bottom lip, hard enough that she tasted copper.
The pain was grounding, real, something to hold onto when everything else was spinning apart.
Rain slammed into her the moment she stepped outside, the sky crying with her.
The guards called after her, but she didn’t stop, didn’t slow.
She ran through the garden paths, her feet slipping on the wet stones, the rain indistinguishable from the tears on her face.
She ran until her lungs burned, until her legs screamed, until she physically couldn’t push herself anymore.
She didn’t know where Felix was. Didn’t care.
Moonlight turned the grand oaks to towering shadows.
Almost subconsciously, she had come back to the same spot that had started this all.
A choked sound came out of her as she took shelter under an oak tree across from the statues, her back slamming against the bark as she slid down to the ground and tucked her arms around herself.
A cavern cracked open in her chest. The feelings that she had been burying deeper and deeper down rose to the surface, as desperate as someone who was drowning clawed their way to breathe.
Her breaths came in shallow gasps, each one doing less than the last. Her limbs tingled, and her body flushed cold as the panic crested far past the point where she could talk herself down.
The edges of her vision darkened, her head swimming as she became ravenous for air.
She surrendered to it, let it almost pull her under.
It had been years since she’d had a panic attack.
Through her blurred vision, she saw the silhouette of Felix in front of her, not the cat, but him, his sleeves rolled up, the rain drenching his shirt as he crouched in front of her. One look from him and a sense of calm washed through her before the panic snatched it back again.
Avery tried to scramble back. “No! Get away from me.”
“I’m not going anywhere, Avery,” he said, voice gentle, rain dripping from his hair.
She pressed her palms against her eyes, the pressure doing nothing to stop the tears.
“You’re a monster; all your kind are,” she said, the words coming out strange and distant, as if they didn’t belong to her.
He visibly flinched at that one. “Yes,” he said.
Shadows appeared at her side, slithering across the forest floor like snakes. But they weren’t coming from Felix, she realized.
They were coming from her, bleeding out of her in wispy tendrils. Felix must have noticed them too, because she saw his surprise as he tracked them across the ground.
“Your kind murdered my father,” she spat, not caring about the implications of standing up to a shifter. How stupid had she been to trust one of them; if only she had known earlier. Now she was fucking bound to one. A sickness rose in her throat, tightening it even further.
“Probably.”
The confirmation broke something in her. Her breath hitched as a sob tore from her throat. She folded in on herself, her arms wrapped tightly around her ribs because she was going to split apart, she was going to shatter into a thousand tiny pieces next to the very thing that broke her.
For a moment, the shadows were calm. Then they exploded outward. Tendrils of darkness writhed through the rain, lashing against the tree trunk, coiling around her arms. The shadows twisted and snarled, feeding off her grief and rage, growing darker and more violent with each breath.
Felix’s eyes went wide, watching her detonate in front of him. She tried to stand, but her legs gave out. The shadows surged higher, blocking out what little light remained. They were going to consume her. She was going to drown in them.
She sensed that he was closer, moving through the darkness that lashed like a tornado around them. The shadows recoiled from him slightly, as if recognizing him. Warm hands pressed on her shoulders.
She froze. “Don’t.”
Felix’s grip tightened, the sensation of his fingers taking her away from the confusion of her mind, for just long enough to remind her that he was there. Something she had wished for her whole life. She didn’t have to drown alone for once.
“You need to breathe.” He crouched in front of her, close enough that she could see the tension in his jaw. “Look at me.”
“I can’t.” The shadows lashed out again, one tendril striking the tree so hard the bark splintered.
Felix caught her wrist, his grip a tender force.
“Yes, you can. Breathe with me.”
She shook her head, gasping. Black swallowed the edges of her vision, pulling her under the surface. The shadows were spinning faster now, a vortex of darkness and rain and grief, and she couldn’t—
“Avery—fuck—”
The world tilted. Her body went limp as the darkness came to collect her. The last thing she felt was Felix’s arms catching her before she hit the ground.
Warm water lapped at her thighs as her consciousness returned.
Avery’s eyes fluttered open. She was in a bathtub?
Her bathtub, back in the dorm. The water was murky but warm, almost hot, as steam curled in wisps around her.
Her clothes were gone, but someone had left her in her undergarments.
Candles flickered along the walls, the bath catching their golden reflection.
She ran her hand through the warm water, trying to remember how she got here.
“Warm enough?” he said.
She jumped as she saw Felix next to her, the water cascading over the edge.
“Goddess, you scared me.”
He didn’t say anything. His shirt was still damp and clinging to his frame. At least he still had pants on. Silently, he raised a washcloth, running it over a piece of mud on her arm.
The tenderness of it caught her off guard.
“If you want me to leave, I will. Just say the word,” he said.
The words sat on her tongue; she even opened her mouth to say them.
Leave. I don’t want you here. But they didn’t come.
They died in her throat as Felix moved closer and reached up to her chin, wiping away the dried blood from where she had bitten through her lip.
She stared at him. His eyes caught hers, something unrecognizable flashing through them before he looked away, his jaw tight.
She had called him a monster, but is this really how a monster would act?
Regret twisted her gut as she grimaced at the memory.
Felix tilted his head. “What are you thinking about?”
“I’m sorry,” she said.
He paused, dipping the cloth back into a separate bowl of water before continuing to work down her arm. “You have nothing to be sorry for.”
She did. She had no way of knowing if a shifter had killed her father, or if he was even dead.
Pain tugged at her chest as she thought about him.
One thing her mother had said had been right at least. If he were alive, why hadn’t he come back?
Why did he leave her? Death would be easier to accept.
The alternative, that he’d chosen to stay gone, cut deeper.
The mud came off in small chunks, small scrapes, and scratches, revealing themselves.
“You don’t have to,” she started.
“Yes, I do.” His jaw tightened. “You were covered in mud and blood and half-frozen. I wasn’t going to leave you like that.”
She swallowed, as if it could force down everything her mother had just served her.
“I’m sorry,” she choked out again.
“Avery,” he said, brushing wet hair from her cheek. “Don’t ever apologize for something that isn’t your fault. You are far crueler to yourself than you have been to me.”
That was enough to push her over the edge. Fresh tears spilled over her as a sob racked her. She tried to wipe them away, but they kept coming. Her whole body shook. From the dinner, from the rage, from the aching loneliness that has lived inside her for so long.
Because she just wanted someone, anyone, to fucking hold her and tell her she wasn’t broken for feeling this way. More than that, she wanted the warmth of someone who wouldn’t leave her when she did.
Somehow, Felix knew. To her surprise, he stepped into the bath with her, clothes and all. He sat down across from her, dragging a sound from her that was half-laugh, half-sob, as he pulled her into his arms, surrounding her like a barrier against the harsh world.
“You’re getting wet,” Avery said.
“It’s nothing.”
She cried into his chest. Into the arms of a shifter.
“You—a shifter—might have killed my father,” Avery whispered, almost as if to make it real, but even saying it out loud, she didn’t quite believe it.
“As your kind killed mine.” He said it so low that she thought she had misheard him. She froze, her breath catching until his hand stroked her back, a steady presence just as her father had been when she was small.
“I understand,” he said softly.
And for the first time, she believed that someone really did understand her.
The words gutted her, flayed open her defenses as her composure completely splintered.
Lost, she buried her face in his chest, her body shaking with the force.
He only held her tighter. She had spent years building barricades, but she was so fucking tired.
For the first time in years, she didn’t feel so alone.