Chapter 6
Colt
Well… Either I finally managed to kill myself doing something incredibly stupid, or heaven has one hell of a recruitment policy because I’m looking at the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.
Not Instagram beautiful. Not the kind of beautiful that comes with lip fillers, cheek fillers, jaw fillers, whatever the hell people are filling these days until everybody ends up looking like they were printed from the same template.
This is… different. The kind of beauty you can’t manufacture.
The kind that existed long before mirrors became something people carried around in their pockets, back when painters spent months trying to capture a woman’s face because they knew they’d never see another one quite like it.
She looks like she belongs in one of those paintings.
Her hair falls over one shoulder in waves the color of polished copper, catching the morning light until every strand glows somewhere between gold and autumn leaves.
Freckles scatter across her nose and cheeks before disappearing beneath the neckline of her dress, only to appear again over her collarbones and down her arms as though the sun had loved her too much to stop.
Then my eyes find hers.
God.
They’re green. Not the bright, almost fake green you see in magazines after someone’s edited the life into a photo.
These are the exact color of the forest around us, deep and impossibly alive, the kind of green you could lose yourself in for hours without ever remembering what you were supposed to be doing in the first place.
Which… Now that I think about it… Might explain why I’ve been staring at her like an absolute idiot for what has to be an embarrassingly long amount of time.
I don’t even notice she’s been watching me watch her until one copper eyebrow lifts with what I think is annoyance.
“Are you quite finished staring, little man, or did striking your head damage something important?”
“…Sorry.” I manage to say.
“That was not an answer.”
“I got distracted.”
“So I noticed.”
“In my defense…” I gesture toward her as much as a man hanging upside down possibly can. “You’re ridiculously gorgeous.”
She studies me with an expression so calm I’m half convinced she didn’t hear me.
“…I see.”
“That’s it?”
“What precisely were you expecting?”
“I don’t know.” I shrug, which is surprisingly difficult upside down. “A thank you. Maybe a blush. A little giggle.”
“You are asking rather a lot from someone who hung you from a tree.”
“Fair point.” I grin.
She continues looking at me for another moment before tilting her head ever so slightly.
“Then why,” she asks with genuine curiosity, “are you still looking at me as though you’ve forgotten how to blink?”
“…I’m trying to decide if blinking would somehow make you disappear.”
For the first time since I met her, she looks genuinely confused.
“…Disappear?”
“Yeah.” I nod thoughtfully. “You know how people say if something seems too good to be true, it probably is? I’m worried you’re some sort of hallucination with a really impressive attention to detail.”
“I assure you,” she says evenly, “if you were imagining me, you would have chosen someone considerably kinder.”
“I don’t know.” I smile. “I’ve made some questionable decisions.”
“I have noticed.”
“I mean, I voluntarily came back.”
“You did.”
“I even brought pastries.”
“…You brought pastries?”
“Oh…” I glance toward the forest floor as though only just remembering. “Right. They probably flew halfway across the forest when you decided yanking my legs out from under me was a better way of saying hello.”
“I did no such thing.”
“You absolutely did.”
“I merely prevented you from wandering where you ought not.”
“By introducing my face to the ground.”
“It was a remarkably brief introduction.”
“You’ve got a very interesting definition of hospitality.”
“And yet,” she says with perfect composure, “you returned.”
“Yeah.” I grin. “I figured the welcome couldn’t possibly get any worse.”
She regards me in silence.
“It appears,” she says at last, “that optimism truly is a dangerous affliction.”
She studies me for another moment before raising her hand.
A quiet snap echoes beneath the canopy, and the roots wrapped around my ankles obey immediately.
I expect them to lower me to the ground. Instead, they simply let go.
“Oh, don’t you even think abou—”
The rest of the sentence disappears beneath a very undignified collision with the forest floor.
“…You know, I was really starting to think we were making progress.” I groan into the moss.
“I have been informed,” she says calmly, “that progress is rarely measured by how gracefully one falls.”
I push myself up onto my elbows, rubbing the side of my head.
“I’d argue that depends entirely on who’s doing the measuring.”
“It does not.”
“It definitely does.”
She watches me for a heartbeat longer before her expression settles into the same unreadable calm she’d worn when I first saw her.
“You have recovered.”
“I mean… mostly.”
“Good.”
She turns away.
“You have tempted fate twice, little man. I will not grant you a third opportunity.”
“So that’s your way of saying you’re going to miss me?”
She doesn’t even look back.
“My way of saying that if you return again, neither I nor the forest will show you mercy.”
“I thought we were past the threatening stage.”
“We are not.”
“You’re sending mixed signals, Pixie.”
She stops.
For just a moment, the entire forest seems to stop with her. The wind dies. The birds fall silent. Even the leaves overhead become perfectly still.
When she speaks again, her voice is quieter than before.
“I warned you once.” A slow breath leaves her. “I warned you twice.”
She turns her head just enough for me to catch the edge of her profile.
“There will not be a third warning.”
The moment the final word leaves her lips, the air around her begins to shimmer.
The mist curls around her feet first, climbing higher until it swallows the hem of her dress, then her hands, her hair, her face.
I don’t even blink. One second she’s standing there. The next… There’s nothing. No footsteps. No rustling branches. No fading silhouette. Just an empty clearing, as though she’d never existed at all.
A cold breeze slips through the trees. Somewhere deeper in the forest, something laughs.
This time… It doesn’t sound quite as friendly.