31. Maeve #2
He stands. Walks to the wall. His palm presses flat against it, and for a moment I think he’s going to hit it, but he doesn’t. He just holds himself there, breathing. His wings twitch, restless. The silver hair catches the firelight.
“She died that way.” His voice comes from a place that sounds broken.
“You know what she was when I found her. Dying already. The rut didn’t care.
It took a woman who had days left and it spent them.
” His fist presses flat against the wall, knuckles down, holding still.
“It doesn’t weigh. It doesn’t wait. It takes. ”
She. The dead mate. The grave with the flowers.
He told me how it ended, by the fire, and he isn’t telling me again.
This is the other side of it—the side Shayla’s story is built on.
Every lie that keeps women behind fences has one true bone in it somewhere, and his worst day is the bone in this one.
He comes back to the fire. Sits. His shoulders are heavy with the weight of eight years of carrying this.
“Enough of the bond took that I felt her go,” he says. His hands turn over, palms up, showing me their emptiness. “Not enough to hold her. I felt the place where she should have been go quiet.”
My throat closes around the horror before I’ve decided whether to let it in.
It should be simple, a man telling me his worst thing, my body supplying the fear that fits it.
What actually happens is stranger. My hands go cold.
My chest aches in the specific spot that means I’m about to cry, and I don’t, because crying is for later, alone, when it won’t cost him anything to see it.
Fear should be the answer. Instead there’s the enormity of what he’s telling me—that he felt that.
That the bond didn’t protect her. That he was forced to be conscious of her death through every second of it.
“I felt your ribs—cracking. First night. Second.” His voice goes rough, present-tense terrible. “Couldn’t stop. The drive was—I couldn’t stop it. The venom worked. The cum worked. But close. It was close.”
He doesn’t finish. He doesn’t need to. If I’d been a little further gone, if my body had been too far broken to answer the venom or the cum or the heat, I would be a mound in the clearing with wildflowers on top and no name.
My skin goes cold picturing it—the old alertness, the one that used to check the exits in a room before I let myself sit down in it.
For a second the fire smoke turns to something else in my head, the chemical sting of the camp’s disinfectant, the smell that meant someone was being cleaned up after.
I press my hand flat against my sternum like I can hold the fear there, keep it from climbing any higher.
“Almost killed you,” he says. Flat. No softening. “That’s what she told them. She wasn’t wrong about that.”
“She was wrong about everything else,” I say.
The fire crackles. His eyes hold mine.
“Yes,” he says. “She was wrong about everything else.”
I sit with the contradiction. The monster who saved me almost killed me. The claiming that gave me new teeth and growing hair and two heartbeats in my belly started with a force that cracked my already-cracked ribs. Both things are true.
The danger was real. The love was also real. The camps only told half the story, and the half they told was the half that kept women behind fences.
“She’s still there,” I say. Not Shayla. The women. Gretchen, Lisa, the others. Still behind the cattle fences. Still being told the story that ends with death instead of the story that ends with this, a fire, a man reading by its light, a belly with two heartbeats.
He watches my face. He can read me the way he reads the bark-strips now, slowly, with effort, but getting better. He sees the thought forming before I say it.
“You want to go back,” he says.
The words land somewhere under my ribs and my whole body goes still the way it used to go still at the sound of the assembly bell, not fear exactly, or not only fear, but the old readiness snapping awake, muscles bracing for a fence that isn’t even in the room.
My hands have made fists in my lap without asking me first.
I’m not ready to say it yet. The thought is too new, too sharp-edged. I need to hold it for a while. Figure out what going back means when going back means walking into the worst place I’ve ever been with the best thing that’s ever happened to me.
“I want to teach you another word,” I say instead. Deflecting. Camp-survival. Don’t show your hand until you’re ready to play it.
His mouth twitches. The first one I’ve seen on his face—an actual, human, almost-smile that looks wrong on his crimson features and exactly right on the man underneath.
He picks up the bark-strip. His finger finds the word he was working on.
“Building,” he says. Without prompting. Without sounding it out. The word whole and sure in his mouth.
The women are building.
He doesn’t know how right he is.
I sit with the knowledge like a stone in my chest, one I’m going to have to carry back through the camps.
The thing I’m building here—the bond, the future beating in the twins’ heartbeats.
All of it. I’m going to walk back into Shayla’s world carrying this, and I’m not going to be the same woman who came out.
I’ve been remade. The camps said the Shades would unmake you, and they were right.
But not the way they meant it. Red remade me into something whole instead of something broken.
Now I have to go back and ask other women to let themselves be remade too.
Knowing that the rut nearly killed me. Knowing that I came this close to being a mound in the clearing with wildflowers on top.
Knowing it was worth it.
The fire crackles. In the darkness, his fingers close around mine.