Chapter 39 #2
The Elders aren’t here. Ash isn’t here. Just me and the man who believes he is entitled. That obsession is love, and believes taking is the same as knowing.
As earning.
Maybe I failed tonight. Not because I hit him, but because I waited so fucking long to do it.
Because I let the laws and my own restraint weigh heavier than the sick dread in Ash’s eyes every time she felt him near — real or imagined.
Never. Again.
I flex my bloodied hands, watching him groan in the dirt. The Elders can strip me of every honor they’ve ever given me — I’ll take it. Ash can hate me for this. As much as it would hurt, I’ll take that too. But I will no longer stand idle while he crawls closer with his poison, his entitlement.
I won’t do it. Her very well-being, autonomy at risk. Not with her. Not with her heart, our world, on the line.
The thoughts curl in my gut like a worm I can’t hope to spit out. Maybe beating him bloody won’t erase the shit he has said. Maybe the filth he has spewn into the air around Ash will bloom later, in some small, private room inside her head where even I can’t follow.
He’s planted images — intimate, invasive little facts, half-truths glinted in the stitches of fantasy — and even if they’re lies, they are still seeds.
People will believe the seeds that have landed nearest to pain in their desire for gossip.
What if when Casie trips over a memory or wakes in the dark, Brett’s hideous words are the first thing to step forward and explain that ache?
What if she thinks of them and looks at me differently — wary.
Wary in a way that matches the way Brett makes me wary, the way he wants to be her watcher?
The idea makes me want to throw up.
My hands are clenched so hard that my bones ache.
I can already imagine the worst. Her brow folds in a way that says she has found something in her head that she doesn’t like.
The small recoil when I reach for her hand, the questions swallowed and left to just…
fester. The times I was her blade. When I couldn’t see, but felt a million times sharper.
So the fear I feel isn’t sitting in one place.
It’s spreading. Through memory, through the itching guilt of all the moments I’ve let slide because of rules and hope.
It asked the question I’m bound to hate: had I protected her or had I only made this worse by making sure his mouth was shut while his poison stayed untouched and un-spread?
I crouch close in the damp grass, watching the rise and fall of his ragged breathing. The park hums like nothing has happened, thanks to my shields. The world doesn’t care if someone like Brett dies; the problem is the world also doesn’t care what he whispered.
I do.
There are brutally simple things to do — clean my hands, hide the evidence of a fight. Keep him somewhere he can’t come at her while he heals. If he heals. But the simple things aren’t going to protect her, nor are they going to inspire the trust between us.
So instead, I’ll do the sort of things that the Elders would nod at… mostly.
First, I’m not going to tell her what was said.
There’s no point. She would gain nothing from the filthy things he spat, from the way he tried to own her with words.
Some truths are knives you hide willingly from the ones you love; some are weapons you hide because love doesn’t always need to bear the wounds.
She doesn’t need Brett’s garbage echoed back at her as validation that he deserved what he got.
She needs me present and steady, not for me to be the cause of any new fractures.
I will continue to watch. Not in the weird, suffocating way Brett watched, but like a sentinel who gives her distance and refuge.
I’ve always had her back and that will never change.
I’m eternally grateful that I’m no longer standing at the edges of her life, on guard should something dark try to slither in, I can have my boot on its neck before she notices.
I’m here to protect. To catch the recoil before it becomes a full blow out.
I’ve already started to erase him from the small, public things — the calls, the texts, the shadowed seats at the shop.
It’s part of the reason she’s rarely alone, even at work.
He’s proven that there is no low too low for him.
He’s tried so hard to make the world small for her, with his obsession surrounding her.
I’ve worked to make it infinitely bigger, to fill it with quiet mornings, the smell of coffee, the small rituals of us, stitched into her new normal.
Habits act like mortar and often heal in a way that thunder can’t.
And, because I can’t pretend the rules don’t matter entirely, I will happily answer for my violence if I have to.
If the Elders tear away my honor or the law comes knocking, I’ll have to hold my hands up and not flinch.
It would be a bargain — my standing for her peace.
I tell myself this aloud, the promise sharp and clean in the open air.
To further calm the bloodlust that has risen inside me, I allow myself to picture her sleeping — hair splayed across the pillows, my chest, the slope of her jaw — and it steadies me.
Not because I’m saving her from everything.
No, I learned a long time ago that, given who we are, that’s an impossible feat.
But I am choosing what I will let her carry, when I can.
She could never forgive me for the blood currently coating my knuckles and I’d have to live with it.
But I can’t let her carry Brett’s voice more than she already does.
A small, ugly part of me still wonders if I should tell her it all.
If honesty, however brutal, would be better than using myself as a shield.
But then I remember how she looked at me after the club, the way her fingers had curled into mine on the walk home like she needed to remember she has something to hold onto.
She’d told me once, in a whisper, that sometimes her memories come back in pieces.
Sometimes it hurts, sometimes it comforts.
I didn’t want to give her a painful piece that belongs to someone else.
Gods know she has enough painful pieces of her own to reclaim.
I stand, wiping the worst of the blood on the dark wash of my jeans.
I debate kicking some dirt in his face when he blinks away.
Fear finally appears to be seeping in where his swagger had been.
Not from the sprain of his ribs or the split lip I’ve gifted him, but from the quiet certainty even his dense ass can’t miss.
I don’t say a word. I don’t think I need to.
As I walk away, I make another promise — not to the Elders, not to rules or rightness, but to the girl I loved who can’t remember the whole of who she is.
I will be careful with what I tell her. I will continue to be brutal in the ways that will keep her safe.
I will be honest in all the ways that matter.
And if ever one of Brett’s poisoned seeds finds the grounds to sprout in her life, I will be the one to pull it out, root and all, even if it bleeds me dry.
The light fades as the park swallows me up and I head home with all that weight tucked under my ribs. Both lighter for having decided, heavier for the cost. But at least I’ve decided. That, I tell myself, will have to be enough.