Chapter Nine #2
I grab onto his coat like it is the only thing holding me together.
And then the sob comes. It tears out of me, raw and uncontrolled, the sound of something breaking that has been held together far too tightly for far too long.
I press my face into his chest, breath hitching violently, body shaking with a force I can’t stop.
Every attempt I make to swallow it down only makes it worse.
It keeps coming. Shock turning liquid. Pain turning sound.
Humiliation and terror and rage and relief all collapsing into something ugly and helpless and real.
I hate it. Hate the sound. Hate the weakness. Hate that I can’t keep it contained. But there is no one watching now. No one taking from it. No one turning it into something else.
He doesn’t tell me to stop. Doesn’t tell me I’m safe now, as if words like that could fix anything.
Doesn’t hush me. Doesn’t offer comfort so polished it sounds fake.
He just stays there, steady and unmoving, letting me come apart without making it worse.
His hand remains warm at the back of my neck.
His arm stays locked around me in that careful, deliberate way that says he knows I am one bad breath away from shattering further if he gets this wrong.
Outside the vehicle the night goes on. Men move through the trees.
Radios crackle. Doors slam. Somewhere in the distance an engine starts and fades.
The world is still moving. The hunt is still moving.
The monster who mattered most got away. Inside the vehicle, for these few shaking minutes, none of it reaches me fully.
All I know is the smell of rain and gunpowder still clinging to him. The roughness of his coat under my hands. The hard rise and fall of his breathing where I’m folded against him. The impossible fact that he came. That he found me. That he was not too late in the one way that mattered most.
A thought hits me then, sharp enough to cut through the sobbing for half a breath.
Briar Hollow. The animals. The shattered mudroom window.
The blood in the yard. The wolves. Diego screaming from the aviary.
The horses throwing themselves against the fence.
The image crashes through me so suddenly that I stiffen. He feels it at once.
“What is it?”
The question is low and immediate, but not demanding.
“My farm,” I whisper, voice scraping. “My animals.”
He doesn’t give me some empty assurance that everything is fine. He doesn’t lie because it would be easier.
“I’ve got men there,” he says. “Nothing’s touching that property tonight.”
I close my eyes. That should frighten me, maybe. More of his men. More of his control spread over my land. Instead it lets me breathe for one second without panic clawing straight through it. My fingers tighten in his coat before I can stop them.
“I should’ve heard them sooner,” I whisper, and the shame in it is worse than I expect. “I knew something was wrong and I still—”
My voice breaks.
He cuts me off before I can finish destroying myself with it.
“No.”
One word. Flat. Absolute.
I lift my head just enough to look at him. His face is shadowed in the dim interior of the SUV, but his eyes are clear and hard and fixed on mine with an intensity that leaves no room for argument.
“This isn’t on you,” he says.
I almost laugh. Almost. Because everything feels like it is on me now.
My land. My body. My choices. My failure to call Nora.
My failure to make enough noise. My failure to run faster.
My failure to stop what was never mine to stop.
But something in his face kills the words before they can come out.
He means it. Not politely. Not tenderly. As fact.
Outside, a flashlight sweeps past the vehicle windows and then away.
Inside, the heat starts to get to me. Not enough to soften anything, only enough that the cold in my skin begins to fight with it.
I become aware all at once of how wrecked my body feels.
The ache in my shoulder. The throbbing in my jaw.
The rawness at my wrists. The deep, sick heaviness that settles lower and makes nausea stir all over again.
I pull back a fraction. Not because I want distance. Because I need air. He lets me. Immediately. His arm loosens. His hand leaves the back of my neck. Space opens around me again without resistance, without that ugly second of force men so often use when they do not want to let go.
I sit there breathing hard, eyes fixed on nothing.
After a moment, he reaches for something near the front seat and comes back with a folded blanket.
He doesn’t drape it over me. Doesn’t tuck it around me.
He just sets it beside me within reach. In case I want it. That nearly undoes me all over again.
I take it with clumsy hands and pull it over my lap. The weight of it helps. Barely. Enough that I can feel the outline of my body again.
Neither of us speaks for a while. The silence is not awkward. Not empty either. It feels like standing in the aftermath of a storm and listening for what still exists.
At some point I realize I’m still crying, but more quietly now.
No longer breaking open. Just leaking grief and shock in smaller, meaner waves.
My head hurts. My throat hurts. Everything hurts.
Marius sits beside me like a dark, controlled force held on a short chain.
He does not fidget. Does not look away. Does not pretend he hasn’t seen me reduced to this.
For some reason, that matters too. He is not sparing me the truth of what I look like. He is just not using it against me.
And somewhere beneath the shaking, beneath the panic and the pain and the sick, lingering weight of what has been done to me, something else remains. Small. Fragile. But real.
I am still here.
And for the first time since that cabin, I am not alone.