Chapter Fifteen #2
I turn just in time to dodge a blade aimed for my ribs. Elias crashes into the attacker, dragging him into a chokehold until his knees buckle.
Boone kicks another man so hard he flips backward into the dirt.
It’s a blur of fists, steel, and fury—but I never lose track of Briar. She clings to me with one hand, reaching for me with the other when I’m too far away.
Daryl struggles beneath me, wheezing, blood smeared across his mouth.
“You think she’s yours?” he chokes. “She’s nothing without me.”
I slam him into the ground again, teeth bared.
“She’s everything,” I snarl. “And she’s not afraid of you anymore.”
Behind me, Briar steps closer—closer—until her fingers wrap around my shoulder, anchoring me.
Her touch pulls me back from the edge. Just enough.
Daryl feels the shift. He laughs, hollow and bitter. “You can’t protect her forever.”
I grab him by the throat and lift his face toward mine.
“Watch me.”
Daryl’s breath rattles under my hand.
I’ve got him pinned to the ground, fingers around his throat, his blood on my knuckles and chest. The world rings from the fight, bodies groaning in the dirt, weapons scattered across the clearing.
But right now, there’s only him. And Briar behind me. And the rage tying us together.
He coughs, tries to spit at my face, but he’s too weak. “You think this is over?” he chokes. “You think she’ll choose you?”
My fingers tighten. The urge to end him—to stop every breath he’ll ever use to hurt someone again—surges hot and bright through my veins.
Then Briar’s touch leaves my shoulder.
For half a second, I think she’s backing away from the blood. From him. From all of us.
Daryl feels it too. His split mouth stretches into an ugly sneer. “There you go,” he rasps. “She knows where she belongs.”
I don’t turn my head. “Shut your mouth.”
He laughs, wet and broken under my hand. “Soon as you blink, she’ll crawl right back. Trained her too good.”
The cabin door slams.
Every muscle in me locks.
Daryl hears it and grins wider, stupid enough to think it means what he wants it to mean. “That’s my girl.”
Elias steps closer, chain hanging loose from one hand, eyes cutting toward the porch.
Boone plants himself between the remaining man on the ground and the doorway.
Silas strips a rifle out of somebody’s reach with one savage jerk.
Gabe shifts at the tree line, crossbow raised, covering the whole clearing without seeming to move at all.
I keep Daryl pinned.
Then the cabin door opens again.
Briar steps out with my rifle in both hands.
The whole mountain goes still.
She is shaking. Not much. Enough. Her hair is wild around her face. Dirt streaks her legs. Her eyes are bright and hard and nothing in them is running now. She comes down the porch steps slow, the barrel already lifted.
Daryl sees her and starts to laugh. “That’s right. Bring it here, girl. Show him who taught you what to do with your hands.”
Briar keeps walking.
One step. Then another.
The rifle does not waver.
Gabe’s finger rests easy on the crossbow trigger, waiting to see which man twitches first.
Briar stops a few feet away.
Daryl’s grin slips.
Her throat works once. Her jaw sets.
Then, in a voice scraped raw but clear enough to split me open, she says, “I was never yours.”
That’s right, sweet girl, he doesn’t get to live inside you anymore.
The shot cracks through the clearing.
Daryl’s head jerks back. His body goes loose under my hand so fast it feels unreal. One second there is fight in him, filth in him, life in him. The next there is nothing but dead weight and blood soaking into the dirt.
Silence lands hard.
Not one of his men speaks.
One of them reaches, stupid and slow, for a dropped knife.
Gabe’s bolt takes him through the forehead before his fingers close.
He folds where he kneels.
“That’s done,” Gabe says.
Boone hauls another bastard up by his collar and slams him face-first into the ground. Elias drives a boot into a wrist until bone cracks and the last rifle skids away. Silas looks down at Daryl’s body, then at Briar, measuring the shape of what happened and finding no reason to question it.
Briar stands there with the rifle hanging in her hands, chest heaving, eyes fixed on the body at my knees. Her face has gone strange and still. Not numb. Not frightened. Like something old and poisoned tore loose from inside her and left room behind.
One heartbeat the clearing is blood and smoke and hard breathing. The next Mama Rue stands at the edge of it, cane planted in the dirt, her face carved out of old mountain stone. I don’t know where she came from. The forest might have spat her up whole.
Her gaze passes over the bodies, over the blood, over Briar holding the rifle.
She nods once.
“Dead men don’t tell no tales,” she says. “And the mountain keeps her secrets.”
Boone and Elias move at that, wordless and sure. Silas jerks his chin toward the trees. Gabe steps forward to cover them while they drag the living and dead into the shadows beyond the clearing. No one asks questions. No one looks at Briar like she did wrong.
Mama Rue keeps her eyes on the girl with the rifle.
“You done, child?” she asks.
Briar’s fingers loosen. The rifle slips from her hands and lands in the dirt with a dull thud.
Then she looks at me.
Not through me. Not past me. At me.
And she runs.
I barely get to my feet before she hits me hard enough to drive me back a step.
Her arms lock around my neck. I catch her under the thighs and lift her clean off the ground.
She clings to me like she is not drowning anymore, like she is choosing where to put all that force instead of being crushed under it.
Her whole body shakes against mine.
I bury my face in her hair and hold on. “You’re safe. Sweet girl, you’re safe.”
But she already knows.
She did not just kill the man who hunted her.
She chose herself.
And then she chose me.