Chapter Eleven
Tobias
I told myself for the better part of a week, that the unease sitting under my ribs is nothing.
Old habits from a long solitude, I keep insisting to myself, some left over vigilance from six years of a quiet that had never once been interrupted by anything worth worrying about.
My bear doesn’t agree. My bear has been pacing at the edges of my mind for days now, low and persistent, refusing to fully settle no matter how many times I walk the treeline and find nothing there.
I almost told Christa about it twice this week.
Both times I talked myself out of it at the last second, telling myself I don’t want to hand her worry over a feeling I can’t even properly explain to myself, let alone to her.
Looking back now, I understand exactly why my bear keeps pushing at me the way it does.
I just wish I listened sooner. I wish I trusted it the way I trusted it the very first night, when it led me straight to her stranded in the dark and never once turned out to be wrong.
Thursday morning feels like any other. Christa is out in the garden bed she started, kneeling in the dirt with a focus I’ve come to love watching, sleeved rolled up, humming something under her breath hat I still haven’t managed to place.
I watch her a moment longer than I need to before I pick up the axe and head for th treeline, telling myself the firewood needs doing regardless of what my bear thinks it sensed, that a man can’t put his entire life on hold chasing a feeling that has produced nothing concrete in a week of watching.
I should have trusted it anyway. I know that now.
I make it maybe twenty minutes into the work, splitting rounds at the edge of the clearing where the trees start to thicken, before the unease sharpens into something I can’t ignore any longer, not vague this time, not distant.
My bear surges up against the inside of my chest so hard I actually stagger, axe half-raised, the same violent, wordless insistence I remember from the I night I found her.
Go. Now. Her.
I don’t think. I drop and leave the axe where it falls and run.
The distance between the treeline and the cabin has never felt longer.
I crash through underbrush I usually walk around, boots finding purchase on ground I know well enough to navigate blind, my whole body moving faster that I believe was possible.
Branches tear at my sleeves. My lungs burn in a way they haven’t in years, not since the last time I truly ran instead of simply moving with purpose.
My bear is screaming now, wordless and furious, some old protective instinct so far past reasoning that I’m not entirely in control of my own limbs anymore, just carried along by something that has decided, with total certainty, that every second matters.
I hear her before I see her. A sound I’ll carry with me for the rest of my life, sharp and terrified, cutting through the trees ahead of me and driving every last shred of caution straight out of my body.
I break into the clearing and see him.
A man I don’t recognise, tall, unremarkable in a way that makes my skin crawl once I understand what he is, ordinary enough to have walked into her life once and convinced her, for three years, that ordinary meant safe.
He has one hand fisted hard on her arm, dragging her toward a car idling at the edge of the drive, and she is fighting him with everything she has, twisting, clawing at his grip, the same sound I heard from the tress tearing out of her again, raw and desperate.
Something in me goes very quiet and very cold.
I don’t remember covering the last stretch of ground.
I remember him turning, some flicker of confusion crossing his face at the size of me closing the distance so fast, and I remember my hand closing around his wrist hard enough that I hear something give before he even fully registered I was there.
He lets go of her. I make sure of that immediately, wrenching his grip open with a force that has nothing careful left in it, every ounce of restraint I spent six years cultivating burns away in the space of a single heartbeat.
“Get away from her.” I say, and I don’t recognise my own voice.
He stumbles back, cradling his wrist, some mix of pain and outrage twisting his face, the particular affronted fury of a man whose never once expected consequences for anything he’s done.
“Who the hell are you? She’s mine, we’re just…”
“She isn’t yours,” I hear the growl underneath my own words, something my bear is pushing up through my throat even in this shape, even without shifting. “She was never yours. Touch her again and I promise you, you will not walk away from it.”
He looks at me properly then, really looks, the way people look at something their body understands as dangerous before their mind catches up to why, and something shifts behind his eyes.
Finally fear, real and immediate, chasing the outrage off his face entirely.
I feel my control fraying at the edges, my bear presses hard against the inside of my skin, wanting out, wanting to finish this the way it knows how to finish things.
I hold it back. Barely. Some last thread of restraint reminding me that whatever happens here, in the next thirty seconds, Christa will be the one who has to carry the memory of it.
I let him see it anyway. Let a flicker of what lives under my skin show through, I don’t fully know what he sees, what shape his fear gives to whatever crosses my face in that moment, but I watch all the blood leave his own.
He runs.
Doesn’t say another word. Doesn’t look back.
Scrambles into his car with hands shaking too badly to manage the door on the first try and peel out down the drive so fast gravel sprays against the porch steps, and then he’s gone, engine noise fading fast into the trees, and the clearing goes suddenly silent.
I turn to Christa.
Christa
I don’t remember deciding to run to him. I just remember being in his arms, shaking so hard my teeth chattered, his hands move over me careful and frantic all at once, checking for injuries I don’t have, murmuring something low and broken that I can’t fully parse through the roaring in my own ears.
Before that, before Toby, before any of it, there had been maybe ninety seconds that I still can’t fully put back together in order.
I remember the car pulling up while I was on my knees in the dirt, hands buried in soil I’d been so proud of, and I remember thinking, absurdly, that it couldn’t be him, that I must be imagining it,
some anxious hallucination brought on by three months of half-believing this exact thing might happen.
And then his hand was on my arm, and the absurdity collapsed into something horribly, immediately real, and every instinct I spent three years training into my body took over before my mind had finished catching up.
I fought. I want that on record, even here, even in my own head.
I didn’t freeze, didn’t go quiet and compliant the way some old, exhausted part of me half expected myself to.
I clawed. I screamed. I planted my feet and made him drag me every single inch of ground he took from me, and some distant, clear-eyed part of my mind understood, even mid-panic, that I was fighting harder than I’d ever once fought for myself while I was actually with him.
Maybe because I finally had something worth fighting to get back to.
“I’m okay,” I manage, though my voice doesn’t sound like it belongs to me. “I’m okay Toby, I’m okay.”
He doesn’t seem to believe me. Keeps his hands on me anyway, one at my back, one cradling the side of my face, tilting it gently to check for any mark his eyes might have missed.
I let him. Need it actually, need the proof of his hands confirming what my own mind can’t quite catch up to yet, that it is over, that he’s gone, that I’m standing in the clearing with someone who just torn across his own land at a dead sprint because some part of him had known,
before I even had a chance to scream, that I needed him.
“How did he find me?” I say and I hear my own voice crack on the last word.
Toby goes very still. I feel it before I understand it, some new tension in the arms still holding me, a stillness that has nothing to do with relief.
“He said something,” Toby said slowly. “While I had him. Before he ran. Said something about a tracker.”
I pull back to look at him properly, my mind catching yo in pieces, slow and sick. “A tracker?”
“On your car. I think… Christa, I think it’s been there the whole time,” his jaw is tight, something furious and controlled moving underneath his voice. “I should have thought to check, I should have…”
“You couldn’t have known,” I say it fast and urgent, needing him to hear it before the guilt in his face can take root any deeper. “Neither of us could have known. I threw my phone out the window. I did everything I thought I was supposed to do. I never thought about the car.”
He pulls me back against him tight, and I feel him breathe me in slow and deliberate, the way I notice he does sometimes, like confirming with his own senses that I’m really here.
“He’s not getting near you again,” he says, low and certain. “I promise you that. Whatever it takes.”
I believe him. Standing here in the wreck of an afternoon that had started so ordinary, dirt still under my nails from the garden, sun still warm o the back of my neck, I believe him completely, the way I learned, slowly over three months, to believe most things he tells me.
But underneath the relief, underneath the fierce, grateful comfort of being held by someone who ran headlong into danger without a second’s hesitation for my sake, something colder has settled into my chest.
My ex knows where I am. Has known apparently, for who knows how long, tracking my exact location through the one thing I hadn’t thought to check, patient enough to wait and choose his moment.
He’s been watching. Maybe for weeks, maybe longer.
I think about all the ordinary afternoons I spent out here feeling safer than I’ve ever felt in my life, the garden, the porch evenings, the slow, careful unfolding of trust I let myself build with a man I was once too frightened to even step out of my car for.
I wonder, sick with the thought, whether he’s been out there watching some of that too.
Whether he’s seen me laughing. Whether he’s seen Toby’s hands on me, gentle where his had only ever been demanding, and let that particular fact curdle into whatever ugly resolve has finally sent him barrelling up the drive today.
And some old, exhausted part of me, the part that has learned, a long time ago, that men like him rarely give up after one failed attempt, I understand with a certainty that makes my stomach turn, that this certainly isn’t over.