Chapter Fourteen
Freely Given — Tavish
Her hand went inside her coat.
I understood what was happening, and I did not blame her for it. She had a man with a bar of iron on one side of her and a liar on his knees in the water on the other, and only one of us was offering her a way out of that cave.
“Give it to him and walk up the passage.” I struggled to push each word out.
She took it out. I saw my own hide in the open air for the first time in what seemed like forever.
Then she turned away from Callum Brodie and ran to me.
He said something and took a step toward her. The water was at his shins. He was a second too slow. She was already down on her knees in front of me.
She put it into my hands. My hands were open on my thighs and could not close, so she closed them for me, one and then the other, and held them shut around it.
“It’s yours.” She had her face right at mine. “It always was. Go.”
She said it in front of a witness. Out loud, in a room with another man in it.
Nothing happened.
I knelt there in the water with my life in my hands and waited for the catch, the way you wait for a wave you have heard and cannot see yet.
The lamp on the rock. Her face. The cold coming up my thighs. Callum standing over the pair of us with the bar in his fist. I had no idea what to do with it.
For years I have been told this did not happen. The last person who put a thing in my hands freely had it sold within the week. I stood on a shore and watched the lid come down, and I had built every hour since on the certainty that nobody did this twice.
The water came up over my thighs and into my lap. Somewhere above us a stone went in the roof, and the sound of it came down the passage and went out again. She was still holding my hands shut. Her mouth was moving. I could not hear one word of it.
There was a part of me that would not open no matter who was knocking. I sat inside it and waited for the trick.
Nothing happened.
And then it did.
The iron came off me all at once.
The end of pain. Nineteen years of a wall between me and every single thing, and the wall was gone, and the first thing I got was not joy—it was noise.
The sea through forty feet of rock. Every stone in that passage.
Fish out past the mouth, and the shape of the ground under them, and the storm sitting on the water above the cliff, all of it arriving at once through a door that had been shut since the year she sold me.
I lifted my head up.
Then the change had me. It was not a shimmer. It was a body taking itself apart at high speed and putting itself together on the other side of something, and it hurt, and it happened in the time it takes to fall over.
I went into the water.
And the water knew me.
The passage let go somewhere above us, and the sea came rushing down it.
Callum had three seconds.
He did not go for me, and he did not go for her.
He went for the wall—waded at it with his hands out through water at his chest, nineteen years and his brother and every night of it, reaching for a thing that has never opened for anybody.
The books went off the shelf behind him and into the black without him turning his head.
Then the roof came off the second bend and the water went dark and the lamp went out. He was not there anymore.
Out is down and through. Forty feet of flooded passage and then the mouth, and past the mouth the whole North Sea in a storm.
I was in it. I was three strokes from all of it.
All those years.
I went in for her.
I have no account of the decision because there was not one. I was in the passage going out, and then I was in the chamber going in, led by my heart.
She was up against the high side of the wall with her chin at the roof and about eight inches of air left. I got her under the arms, which was what she did for me on a beach in October, and I took her down and through.
Rock came past us in the dark. Something took my shoulder open. She held on to me the whole way with both hands in my fur and did not let go once. She must have thought she was dying, and she did not let go.
The shelf under the cliff was wet and black and above the water for another hour.
I got her onto the rock. She came up on her hands and was sick, and then she sat with her arms around herself, shaking, breathing. Her right arm was hanging wrong at the shoulder. There was nothing I could do about a shoulder.
The storm was straight over us. White water going up the rock below and the tide climbing the shelf and the whole coast roaring.
Neither of us did anything for a while.
She got her breath and lost it and got it again. I stayed where I was on the wet rock with the sea at my back. I had no idea in the world what she was going to do, and there was no version of it I could have argued with.
Then she got her head up and wrapped an arm over me.
Nobody had seen me. Not in nineteen years. Not one living person on this earth has seen what I am, and she sat there in the wind with her arm broken and her hair in her face and she took in all of me.
“God,” she whispered. “You’re . . . you’re beautiful.”
I had no words. There was no mouth for them. I could not have asked her if I had wanted to.
I shifted instead.
I moved closer, the wet rock biting into my knees, and lifted my hand. My fingers brushed the hair back from her face, tucking the strands behind her ear. Her skin was cold under my touch. She shivered, but she didn’t pull away.
“Tavish,” she said, my name barely audible over the storm.
I didn’t think. I leaned in and pressed my forehead to hers, closing my eyes, breathing her in. Salt and rain and her, solid and alive and here.
“I could have lost you,” I said, my voice rough.
“You didn’t,” she said. “You came back.”
“I will always come back,” I said, and I meant it more than I had ever meant anything.
She lifted her good hand and pressed it to my chest, over my heart. I could feel her palm through the wet fur, feel the way her fingers curled like she was holding on for dear life.
“Then don’t go,” she said. “Not yet.”
I closed the last inch between us and kissed her.
It wasn’t gentle. It wasn’t careful. It was years of hunger and fear and hope crashing into one point, and she kissed me back like she’d been waiting for it since the first night she found me on the beach.
Her fingers tightened in my fur. My hand slid to the back of her neck, holding her steady, anchoring her to me as the storm raged around us.
When I finally pulled back, we were both breathing hard, our foreheads still pressed together.
“Go,” she said, but her voice shook, and her hand was still on my chest.
I turned my head and put my lips to her temple, lingering there. “I’ll come back to you,” I said. “I promise.”
She nodded, once, and let her hand fall.
I went into the water.
I turned once and put my head up.
She was still sitting on that rock, small and alone in the storm, her hand pressed to her mouth like she was trying to hold the moment inside her.
And I left her there.