Chapter 5
Margaux
I make a decision, and I make it the way I make all the decisions that matter, which is quietly, alone, with my knees in the grass at an empty grave.
I'm going to love him again.
Not the old way. The old way is gone and I'm not going to spend the rest of my life trying to resurrect it — that's a fool's errand, that's a woman trying to un-bury what the years already took.
The old Ezekiel, the warm laughing wolf who shifted for joy and carried me up the ridge, that man died at twenty-seven on a grey Tuesday and I grieved him and I'm allowed to keep grieving him.
But there's another man now. The Ghost version.
Thinner, quieter, carrying seven years of shadows in the set of his shoulders, with a wolf that barely breathes and might never run again.
I'm going to love that one. The damaged one. The one who came home.
It is not easy and I'm not going to pretend it is.
The anger doesn't go away. That's the part nobody warns you about — that you can decide to love someone and still be furious at them, that the two things live in the same chest at the same time and some days the fury is louder than the love and you just have to let it be.
I'm angry at Ezekiel for the choice. I'm angry at the universe for the cruelty of the shape of it.
But mostly, I find, when I let myself look at it honestly, I'm angry at Conrad.
So I go to Conrad.
I walk into his office without knocking, which nobody does, and I shut the door, and Conrad looks up from his desk and sees my face and sets down his pen and says nothing, because he's smart enough to know what's coming.
"You ordered it," I say.
"I did."
"You stood at his funeral and you watched me collapse over that grave and you knew. You knew the box was empty. You knew he was in a tree line somewhere watching me fall apart, and you let me. You let me grieve a living man for seven years."
"Yes."
I'm shaking. Seven years of grief that I aimed at the wrong target — at God, at fate, at the trafficking ring that supposedly killed him — and now I know where it actually belongs, and it all comes up at once, and I let it.
I tell Conrad exactly what those seven years cost. The black year.
The Sundays. The mornings I woke reaching for a side of the bed that would never be warm again.
The slow brutal labor of building a life around a hole.
I say all of it, my voice climbing, and Conrad takes every word of it without flinching, without defending, without once telling me I don't understand the bigger picture.
When I run out of words he's quiet for a moment.
Then he says, "You're right to be angry.
Every bit of it. The decision was mine, and given the same choice — the network, the cages, the math of it — I'd make it again.
I won't insult you by pretending otherwise.
" He folds his hands. "But the cost of it didn't fall on me.
It fell on you. You carried the price of my decision for seven years and there is nothing I can ever do to repay that.
So I won't try to talk you out of being angry.
I'll just carry knowing I'm the reason."
"You're right," I say. "You can't repay it."
"No," he agrees. "I can't."
And I walk out, and the strange thing — the thing my sister tried to tell me — is that it helps.
Not the words. The act. The act of standing in front of the man responsible and putting the weight where it belongs.
I've been carrying seven years of grief that had no address, and now it has one, and I've delivered it, and my arms are lighter.
I channel what's left into something useful.
I help with the recovery. I drive him to the sessions with Jo and I sit through the painful wolf-reconnection exercises, watching him reach down into himself and come up empty, watching the hope flare and die.
And I'm there at night, because the withdrawal from the suppressants is worst at night, and the insomnia it gives him is brutal — three days awake at a stretch, his body shaking off seven years of chemistry all at once.
I read to him on those nights. I sit in the chair by his bed in the guest cabin and read until my voice goes hoarse, and sometimes it helps him drift, and sometimes it doesn't, and I read anyway.
I see the damage up close. The tremors that run through his hands by evening.
The sweat that soaks through his shirt during the bad episodes.
The moments his eyes flash gold and then die back to brown, the wolf surging and failing, surging and failing, a flame that can't catch in a draft.
I hold his hand through the worst of it, and I think: you held yourself together for seven years in the dark, alone, with no one to read to you.
I can hold you together now. I can do at least that.
It happens on a night the wolf breaks through.
I've been there every night for a week. It's late, past midnight, and he's in the grip of one of the bad ones — the withdrawal at full force, fever-hot, drenched, the muscles in his back and arms jumping under the skin.
His wolf is fighting the chemical damage, surging against the inside of him in waves I can almost see, his body arching with it, his eyes flickering brown to gold to brown like a signal struggling through static.
I've stopped reading. The book is on the floor.
I'm lying on the bed beside him with my arms around him from behind, my chest against his shaking back, holding on, and I say into the damp skin of his neck, "I'm here. Come back. I've got you. Come back."
And the wolf surges.
I feel it happen — feel the wave crest and hold this time, not gutter out but hold, hold, his whole body going taut and then settling into something steadier, something present. He turns over in my arms. And his eyes —
His eyes are gold. Full gold, both of them, for the first time in seven years, gold all the way through, and behind the gold there's something I haven't seen since the day he died: him.
The man and the wolf together. Fused. Awake.
Looking at me like he's surfaced from underwater and I'm the first thing he's seen.
"Sunflower," he says.
Not Margo. Sunflower. The name he gave me in the dark seven years ago and only ever used in bed, low, against my skin, the name I have not heard in seven years and thought I would never hear again, and it undoes me.
Every wall I've held all week, every door, the whole architecture of my careful articulate anger — it all comes down at the sound of one word in his voice, and I am crying and reaching for him at the same time.
I pull him to me and I kiss him.
And the seven years collapse into a single point of contact.
His mouth on mine, the beard rough against my face, his breath ragged and warm — and then his hands are in my hair, both of them, the way they used to be, his fingers spread against my skull like he's holding the most fragile thing he's ever touched, and he makes a sound against my mouth that's half the man and half the wolf, low and broken and starving.
It's clumsy at first, and I want to say that, because nobody tells you that either — that the great loves are not always graceful.
We've both changed. His body is different under my hands, thinner, the ribs too close to the surface, new scars I find in the dark and don't ask about, not now, later.
My body's different too, stronger, harder than the soft girl he left.
The wordless easy choreography we used to have is gone, and we have to build a new one, and so we go slow.
He shakes — partly the wolf still surging under his skin, partly the want, partly seven years of being touched only in cruelty — and I steady him, both hands flat on his chest where I can feel his heart slamming against my palms. Slow, I tell him, my mouth at his jaw.
I've got you. We have all night. We have the rest of our lives.
I undress him because his hands are shaking too hard to do it himself, and I take my time, and every inch of him I uncover I touch with my whole palm, claiming it back from the years that stole it.
The hollow of his throat, where his pulse jumps under my lips.
The sharp wing of a collarbone. The flat plane of his stomach, gone lean and ridged, that tightens and shudders when I drag my mouth down it.
The map of new scars across his ribs I press my lips to one at a time, and he makes a low broken sound at each one and his hand fists in my hair, not pulling, just holding, like he needs something to hold.
His skin is fever-hot everywhere — the wolf running close to the surface, the heat of him pouring off in waves — and I want all of it against me, so I pull my own shirt over my head and his eyes go molten gold at the sight, and the sound he makes then isn't a man's sound at all.
He learns me back. Slow, reverent, his rough hands relearning the shape of me — the curve of my hip, the weight of my breast in his palm, his thumb dragging slow until I arch up off the bed and gasp his name.
He kisses down my throat, my sternum, the soft skin below, his beard rasping, his breath scalding, and seven years of starvation are in every place his mouth lands.
By the time his hand slides between my thighs I'm already trembling, already arching into the heat of him, and his fingers are patient and certain and they know exactly the rhythm that takes me apart — they remember, his body remembers even when his hands shake — and he works me higher and higher, his gold eyes fixed on my face, watching me come undone like it's the thing he crossed seven years of hell to see, until I break against his hand with his name in my mouth and his name and his name.
And then I draw him down over me, and the weight of him — lighter than it was, but his, unmistakably his — settles between my thighs like the answer to seven years of an empty bed, and I wrap my legs around him and pull him in.
The joining is slow. Achingly slow. He presses into me by inches, his forehead dropping to mine, his whole body locked tight and trembling, and I feel him hold there at the edge of it like he can't believe he's allowed — like he's afraid that if he moves I'll vanish and the bed will be cold again the way it's been cold for seven years.
I feel every part of it, the stretch and the heat and the fullness of him, and I hear the sound it tears out of him, raw and cracked and grateful, his breath shuddering against my cheek.
So I move first. I lift up into him, taking him deeper, and the gold in his eyes blazes and his control breaks, and then we find it — slowly, both of us building it together from nothing, his hips and mine, the new rhythm, the one that belongs to who we are now and not who we were.
He's still shaking and I hold him through it.
I tighten around him and he groans into my neck.
The bed frame finds the wall and we don't care.
It's not the love we had. It can't be. The love we had belonged to two people who didn't know what the world could take.
This is the love of two people who've already lost everything and found their way back to the wreckage and decided to build there anyway.
It's slower. It's rougher. There are tears — mine, his, I lose track of whose.
He says my name and the other name, Margo, Sunflower, Margo, against my throat, my collarbone, my mouth, like he's making sure I'm real with every breath.
The gold in his eyes never wavers, holds the whole time, the wolf riding the surface of him, present, here, and when we finally crest it's together, his face buried in my neck and my hands fisted in his too-long hair, and I feel the wolf give one long shuddering whisper-howl deep in his chest, pressed against me, the sound vibrating through both our bodies.
After, we lie tangled in the dark, his head on my chest now, my fingers tracing the scars I'll learn the stories of eventually, his breathing finally — finally — slow and even, the fever broken, the shaking stilled.
He's asleep before I am, the deepest sleep he's had since he came back, Jo will tell me later, the suppressant turning a corner, the body finally letting go.
And I lie awake under the weight of him and I think: it's better.
I never thought I'd think that. I thought if I got him back it would be a return, a restoration, the old life resumed.
But it isn't. It's something we made out of the broken pieces with our bare hands in the dark, and it cost both of us everything, and it is more ours than the old love ever was because we built it ourselves, knowing exactly what it's worth.
It's not the same. It's earned.
It's better.