Chapter 41
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
CALDER
His hand was still in mine when I realized I needed to send him away.
The thought settled into me with terrifying clarity.
I looked down at our entwined fingers.
His still curled easily around mine, warm and trusting despite everything that had just happened in the woods around us.
Something painful twisted beneath my ribs.
He had stepped into danger without hesitation tonight, and he would do it again.
His eyes lifted immediately toward my face. “Calder?”
His voice had softened, concern replacing the earlier adrenaline. He was watching me too closely, reading through the silence I had not yet broken.
I forced my attention toward the trees beyond him instead, searching the darkness out of habit while I tried to force the words into something clean enough to survive saying aloud.
The decision had already been made.
I released his hands and took a step back. “You have to leave,” I murmured, each word more painful than the last.
Milo went completely still.
For a moment the forest seemed to hold its breath with him. Then his brow pulled slightly. “Leave?”
“Go back to the cabin tonight,” I instructed, taking another step back. “And tomorrow, you return to Chicago.”
The confusion disappeared from his face almost immediately, replaced by defiance. “No.”
The answer came without hesitation.
I should have expected that.
“You do not understand what this becomes if you stay. The hunters will return. The other presence is still moving through this territory. Eventually, something will go wrong.”
“I know.” The certainty in his voice stopped me. Milo stepped closer instead of backing away, stubbornness settling visibly into his expression now. “I know this isn’t over. I know they’ll come back.”
“Then you understand why you cannot remain here.”
“No,” he repeated. “That’s exactly why I’m not leaving.”
Something sharp stabbed through my chest at the words.
“You are human,” I said, harsher than I intended. “You do not survive mistakes like this.”
“And you think throwing yourself in front of danger every time is somehow better?”
I went still.
“You keep deciding the answer is you getting hurt instead of letting anything reach me,” he continued. “Like I’m supposed to stand there and accept that.
“It keeps you alive.”
“And what happens to you?”
The question landed harder than anger would have, because he asked it like my survival mattered just as much.
“You do not understand what I am.”
“No,” Milo murmured. “I understand exactly what you are.”
I believed him.
Milo held my gaze without hesitation.
“You’re the one who saved my life,” he continued. “You’re the one who stayed beside me every single time I did something stupid out here. You’re the one who nearly got torn apart because your first instinct was protecting me instead of defending yourself.”
His voice roughened slightly. “And I’m supposed to leave you here alone after that?”
The twisting in my chest was painful.
I had gone centuries without wanting anything strongly enough for it to frighten me.
Now I looked at him and understood exactly how dangerous love could become.
Oh, my heart.
The thought surfaced before I could stop it.
Not instinct.
Not metaphor.
Truth.
Milo’s attention sharpened immediately, his expression changing slightly as though he sensed something shifting beneath my silence, even if he could not fully hear the thought itself.
“That is exactly why you need to go,” I said more quietly now. “Because you will not leave on your own. Because you will keep stepping into danger beside me.”
His expression softened then, anger fading and eyes brimming with understanding.
“You don’t actually want me to leave.”
It was not a question.
I did not answer.
I did not need to.
Something gentled briefly across his face at my silence. “Then stop pretending you do.”
“I am not pretending.”
“Yes, you are.”
His voice remained frustratingly calm. “You’re trying to convince yourself this is protection when really you’re terrified something’s going to happen to me.”
The words struck with uncomfortable precision.
Not fear for myself—for him.
Always him.
I reached up and closed my hand around the stone at my chest. The familiar edges pressed into my palm immediately, grounding me in something older than this moment before the feeling inside me could split fully open.
Milo’s eyes followed the movement. “The stone,” he said, his voice softer now. “You never told me where it came from.”
I should not have answered.
I knew that, but something inside me had already begun opening the moment he answered my warning calls with his own in the forest.
“It was given to me,” I said.
Milo stayed silent, waiting.
“A long time ago,” I continued. “By a Ho-Chunk woman who lived near this territory before the roads were built.”
His gaze focused on me.
I looked past him toward the trees as the memory rose again whether I wanted it to or not. “She moved through the land like she understood she belonged to it instead of believing it belonged to her.”
Milo remained silent beside me but when I finally looked back at him again, his expression had softened into something deeper than curiosity.
Something that looked dangerously close to reverence.
Listening.
“She knew those woods had a guardian,” I continued. “Not who I was. Not the way you know me, but enough.”
“You told her?”
“No.”
“Then how did she know?”
“She paid attention.”
The words settled softly between us.
Simple.
True.
“I stayed closer to her family than I should have,” I admitted. “Watched longer than I was meant to. Intervened when danger moved too close without them knowing.”
“For her?”
“Yes. And for her family.”
There was no reason to soften that truth now.
“They ended their days together around the fire,” I continued.
“They told stories. She was always the last to eat, making certain everyone else had eaten first. By the end of the evening, the children had always found their way back to her, one by one, until someone had fallen asleep against her shoulder.” I smiled at the memory.
Realization darted across Milo’s serene eyes then, but I could already feel where the memory turned sinister.
“I was not there when it mattered,” I said.
His brow pulled immediately. “What happened?”
I forced the words out. “I was following signs of another presence beyond the northern ridge. By the time I returned…” I stopped briefly. “The air smelled wrong. Smoke. Blood. Metal.”
I could still smell it if I let myself remember too clearly. “I found them afterward,” I continued. “Most were already gone.”
“And her?”
“She was still alive.”
The words scraped something raw inside me even now.
I could still see her reaching for me through smoke-tinged air while I knelt beside her too late to change anything.
“She saw you clearly then?” Milo asked softly.
“No, but enough.” I loosened my grip slightly on the stone. “She reached for this before she died and pulled it from her own neck. Her fingers were already cold when she pressed it into my hand.”
Milo’s throat moved once as he swallowed. “What did she say?”
“You don’t have to hide.”
The memory hit with painful clarity.
Words I had carried for centuries without ever repeating aloud.
The silence afterward felt almost deafening. The forest around us remained alive with sound, but between us everything narrowed into the weight of those words and the memory attached to them.
“She was the first human who ever looked toward me without fear,” I muttered. “The first who understood enough to see me clearly.”
My grip closed harder around the stone. “And she died anyway.”
I forced the next words out. “I was not there when she needed me, and afterward there was nothing left for me to change.”
The ache never lessened. I had only learned to carry it quietly.
“I will not survive that kind of loss twice.”
Milo’s expression faltered slightly at the words. It was not pity; it was never pity.
Recognition. The terrible kind that comes from understanding exactly how much another person means to you.
My feet carried me closer before I fully realized it.
“So do not tell me standing here is enough,” I said, more quietly now. “Do not ask me to gamble your life against time and distance and chance.”
The truth had already risen too far inside me to force it back down again.
“I will not watch someone I—” The word lodged hard behind my ribs. This time I did not stop it. “—someone I love die because I chose to keep him beside me.”
The confession hung between us with nowhere left to retreat.
No way to unsay it.
He stared at me in complete silence, the shock of it written openly across his face beneath something deeper and far more fragile.
“You are not her,” I continued more quietly. “But losing you would not hurt less simply because centuries have passed.”
I held his gaze now without looking away.
“So I am telling you again, Milo Hart,” I said. “You have to go.”