Chapter Twenty-two
Declan
Iwalked into the forest because it was the opposite direction Avena was.
Snow pressed cold between my bare toes. The sensation should have hurt after the first hundred yards, but the cabin gave me only the idea of freezing.
No numbness. No damage. Just enough cold to make every step feel real while I crossed a world that wasn’t.
Behind me, the cabin waited beside the lake.
I didn’t look back.
The lightning-split cedar rose ahead, its black scar dividing the trunk from crown to root. Four stones stood near its base where we had stacked them during our mapping exercise. Proof that the path repeated. Proof that even escape had been built with a limit.
I kicked the stack apart.
One stone vanished beneath the snow. Two rolled against the cedar. The last traveled several feet and stopped without leaving the kind of trench it should have cut through the powder.
“Of course,” I muttered.
The forest had never been good at consequences.
I kept walking.
One hundred twelve steps past the cedar, the world bent without moving. The split trunk stood ahead of me again. The stones remained scattered where I had kicked them.
I stopped beside them and looked back toward the cabin. A warm square of window showed through the trees. Avena stood behind the glass, silver hair pale against the room, one hand braced on the window ledge.
She had watched me but she hadn’t followed. It was the smallest thing she had promised, and the first thing she could prove.
Bare minimum, I told myself, but it wasn’t meaningless. I turned away from the window and walked the loop again.
The image refused to widen. I couldn’t see the door or the controls. Couldn’t see what they had done to my head. Couldn’t remember how I had gone from a field shelter in the rain to a machine under an alien woman’s home.
For once, the failure came with relief. Then I hated myself for being relieved.
If I had a life left.
One second she was gone, and the next my body had already turned toward the lake, as if losing sight of her mattered more than anything she had confessed.
I stood there, furious with her, the cabin, and the part of me that still dreaded her absence.
Then Avena crossed the window carrying her white cup. She set it on the table and returned to the glass. My shoulders came down before I told them to. That made me angrier than the panic had.
I left the marked path and pushed between the trees until the scenery folded again.
I tried walking toward the dark gap between two identical spruces.
The cedar waited beyond it. I tried the lake.
The shoreline curved, the unfinished air lost its cold, and the next rise returned me to the same scarred trunk.
The dream wouldn’t give me a place she couldn’t see but it could still give me distance.
I found the hollow from my childhood, the shallow shelter beneath an uprooted tree where I had hidden tackle boxes and every problem too large to carry home.
The roots formed a wall against my back.
Snow stopped at the entrance as neatly as if somebody had drawn a line.
Grandpa had found me there once after I failed a math test and decided my future was over. He sat beside me without asking permission, handed me half a sandwich, and waited until I admitted I was an idiot.
Then he agreed. I could almost hear him now.
You love her?
Don’t want to. She’s the enemy.
Didn’t ask what you wanted.
“You’re dead,” I told the memory.
It had the good sense not to answer.
I lowered myself into the hollow and rested my forearms on my knees.
Did I love her?
Yes.
I loved the woman who had attacked flour with the seriousness of a military campaign.
The woman who had learned to throw a snowball, dance without counting, and drink terrible coffee because it belonged to me.
I loved the way her mind took every loose fact apart and rebuilt it into something exact.
I loved her dry, accidental humor and the rarer jokes she made on purpose.
I loved the colors beneath her skin because they had taught me the difference between what she showed the world and what she trusted me to see.
But she was Khevari. She had accepted a human being as property. She had looked at the body beneath her house, recognized my face, and returned to lie to me.
All these things were true. Love did not make the second one smaller. Anger did not make the first disappear.
I sat in the false woods until silence stopped helping. When I climbed out of the hollow, Avena was still at the window. I walked to the cedar and stopped.
Avena moved away from the window before I reached the porch. By the time I opened the door, she stood beside the table with both hands visible at her sides. The fire had burned lower. Her white cup remained untouched beside my ugly-fish mug.
The silver bracelet still circled her wrist. She looked at my face and said nothing. No apology. No question about where I had gone. No demand to know what I had decided. I closed the door.
“You stayed.”
“You asked me to.”
“You watched.”
Blue-white light gathered beneath her throat. “Yes.”
“Why?”
Her fingers flexed once. “Because you were beyond my reach, and I did not know how to stop wanting to make certain you returned.”
“But you didn’t come after me.”
“No.”
“You could have.”
“Yes.” Her voice softened. “But you told me not to.”
Still, it was a beginning.
I crossed to the fire and held my hands toward it, though they weren’t cold. Avena stayed beside the table. I could feel her attention on me without turning.
“I don’t forgive you,” I said.
“I know.”
“I don’t trust you the way I did.”
Her breath caught quietly. “I know.”
“And I’m still angry.”
“You have—” She stopped herself.
I looked over my shoulder. Gold flashed beneath the blue-white light at her jaw. “I was going to say you have the right to be angry. You told me to stop defining what is permitted.”
“Good catch.”
“I am learning.”
“Apparently.”
The corner of her mouth almost curved. It vanished before it became a smile.
I faced the fire again.
“I kept waiting for it to go away.”
“For what to go away?”
“Wanting you.”
“That surprises you?” I asked.
“Yes.”
The answer was so immediate I almost laughed.
“Trust me. It surprises me, too.”
“You are angry with me.”
“Very.”
“You no longer trust me.”
“Not with anything that matters.”
Pain moved across her face, but she did not look away from it or make me soften the statement.
“Then I do not understand.”
“Neither do I.” I rubbed a hand over my neck. “I walked that loop until I got tired of seeing the same damn tree, trying to make what I feel line up into something reasonable. It didn’t.”
She looked at my mouth. This time, she didn’t pretend she hadn’t. The desire that had survived the truth pulled tight between us. It was stupid. Ill-timed. Probably the worst decision available in a cabin full of bad options. I wanted it anyway.
“Do Khevari kiss?” I asked.
Avena blinked. “Historically.”
“Historically?”
“The practice exists in early records and some occupation studies.” Her voice had gone precise, the way it did when facts offered safer ground. “It is not part of current Khevari intimate behavior.”
“What is?”
Her confusion deepened. “Reproduction is managed through controlled genetic contribution and artificial gestation.”
“That wasn’t exactly what I asked.”
Color flooded beneath her cheekbones.
“Direct sexual contact is considered inefficient and physiologically unnecessary,” she said. “It introduces avoidable variables, including infection, injury, autonomic destabilization, and attachment responses that may interfere with clear judgment.”
I stared at her.
“Your people engineered sex out of civilization.”
“That is not the approved phrasing.”
“I bet it isn’t.” A smile played at my lips despite myself.
Her light flickered gold despite everything. “Kissing is regarded as especially difficult to justify. It has no reproductive function.”
“Neither do pancakes.”
“I had not considered that comparison.”
A laugh escaped me. One breath, rough at the edges, gone almost as soon as it appeared.
Avena looked startled by the sound. So was I.
“I want to kiss you,” I said.
“You want to place your mouth against mine?”
“That’s generally how it works.”
“Now?”
“Yeah.” I dragged a hand through my hair. “I know how stupid that sounds. I’m angry at myself for wanting it. I’m angry at you. I’m angry that knowing what you are didn’t kill this. Pick one.”
“I am not asking you to defend it.”
“Good, because I can’t.” I took one step toward her and stopped. “And you don’t owe me this. Not because you hurt me. Not because I came back. Not because I want it.”
Avena’s breath moved shallowly now. “What would it mean?”
“I don’t know.”
Her brows drew together.
“That’s the honest answer,” I said. “It means I still want you. It means the part of us that was real before I knew the rest is still real now. It does not mean I forgive you. It doesn’t mean I trust you again. And it won’t make any of this okay.”
“Then why?”
“Because I’ve had every choice taken away from me, and I want to make one while I can.”
The words changed her expression. Not hope. Something quieter and more painful.
I stayed where I was.
“Do you want me to kiss you?”
Avena looked stunned all over again. The question was simple. Or to me it was. To her it probably wasn’t. The answer definitely was not. I watched her examine whatever stood between Khevari efficiency, human history, her fear of taking anything else from me, and the heat gathering beneath her skin.
She crossed the first step between us.
“Yes,” she said.
I didn’t move.
Her throat worked. “I want you to.”
That was different. I closed the distance slowly enough for her to change her mind. She didn’t.
Up close, her light turned every breath visible. Blue-white radiance gathered beneath her throat and spread across her collarbones. I lifted one hand, stopped before touching her, and waited. Avena leaned her cheek into my palm.
The permission hit harder than I expected. Her skin was warm. My thumb rested near the light at her jaw, and the pulse beneath it moved too fast. She watched my mouth with the same concentration she had once given pancake batter.
“Don’t overthink it,” I murmured.
“That instruction has never produced useful results.”
“Fair enough.”
I bent my head and kissed her.
For one second, Avena went completely still. No breath. No movement. Her mouth remained soft beneath mine, but nothing in her answered. I pulled back immediately.
“Avena—”
Her hand closed in the front of my shirt.
“I did not know what to do,” she said. Her eyes were wide, her face bright enough to light the space between us. “You stopped before I determined it.”
“You don’t have to determine anything.”
“I am aware.” Her grip tightened. “Do it again.”
The words went straight through me.
“You’re sure?”
“Yes.”
I kissed her the way I had wanted to before the truth, and the truth came with us.
Anger. Grief. The bracelet cold against my wrist when her arm rose around my neck.
The memory of her standing beyond curved glass while my real hand lay motionless between us.
The sound of her saying because you were here.
The fact that she had lied. The fact that she had returned.
None of it disappeared.
Her mouth opened beneath mine, uncertain for only a heartbeat. Then she made a soft sound that broke the last of my restraint. I drew her against me. Her body fit along mine with nothing efficient about it, and the cabin filled with light.
She kissed me back like she had crossed too many forbidden lines to stop at the first one. And still I wanted more.
That was why I ended it.
Neither of us spoke for several breaths. Then she touched her mouth with two fingers.
“That did not feel unnecessary.”
“No.” My voice came out rough. “That’s part of the problem.”
Her gaze lifted to mine. “Do you regret it?”
“No.”
The line of her shoulders eased before she could stop it.
“I’m not promising what happens next.”
“I understand that, too.” Her fingers loosened but did not leave my shirt. “I will not decide what it means for you.”
“Of course,” I said.
I let my hand slide from her waist and caught hers before the cabin could take it. Her fingers closed around mine.
“Declan.”
There were too many things inside my name. I didn’t ask her to sort them.
“I’ll be here,” I said.
“I know.”
Her hand vanished from mine.
The cabin took her.
I could still taste her, but I was still angry.
And I wanted her back anyway.