Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Thirteen
Leona
I wake slowly, not all at once but in pieces, as though my mind isn’t ready to come back in one clean motion.
Awareness arrives in fragments. The softness beneath me.
The faint warmth near my hand. The quiet that doesn’t feel threatening.
Then comes the weight, not on me but in me, a heaviness sunk so deep into my muscles that even the smallest shift feels deliberate.
For one suspended moment, I keep my eyes closed and stay there, somewhere between sleep and waking, where nothing has shape yet and nothing has to be acknowledged.
Then memory moves. Not the whole of it. Not enough to drag me under immediately. Only a shard, sharp enough to catch. A table. A voice. The feeling of being held where I did not want to be held.
My eyes open. The ceiling comes into focus first, clean lines, soft morning light, nothing warped or stained or broken.
It takes me a second to place it, to remember where I am.
Not the cabin. Not the ranger hut. Not the table.
That should steady me more than it does, but my chest tightens anyway, my breath catching before I force it deeper and slower, the way I did the night before when breathing became the only thing I could still control.
That is when I feel it. Warmth. Not suffocating. Not trapping. Just there. Steady.
I turn my head and find him immediately.
Marius hasn’t moved far. He is still beside me, close enough that sometime in my sleep I must have reached for him again without knowing it.
One arm lies near mine, not wrapped around me, not holding me in place, just within reach.
My fingers are still touching his sleeve, barely, the backs of them resting against the fabric over his wrist in the same careful, almost not-touch I chose before I let myself fall asleep.
I go still. In the quiet of morning, without panic chasing me from every direction, I can see more clearly.
The control in the way he holds himself even at rest. The tension that never fully left him, like some part of him stayed awake through the night even if the rest of the house slept.
His face is quieter like this, stripped of some of its harder edges by stillness, but not softened.
There is nothing soft about him. Even now he looks like a man built to wake with violence already in his hands if he needs it.
He didn’t sleep.
The realization comes easily, and something in my chest shifts in response. Not guilt. Not gratitude exactly. Something quieter and more dangerous than either of those. He stayed. The thought doesn’t feel surprising anymore. Only real.
It shows in the way my body doesn’t jolt when I wake. In the way the room doesn’t immediately feel wrong. In the fact that when I become aware of his closeness, I don’t recoil from it. Carefully, I move my fingers, brushing his sleeve again, this time on purpose.
He reacts instantly, not with a start but with awareness. His eyes open sharp and focused, already present by the time they find mine, and I understand at once that he was never very far from waking at all. That too should alarm me more than it does.
I hold his gaze. Neither of us speaks for a moment.
“You didn’t leave,” I say.
My voice is rough with sleep, but steadier than it was the night before.
“I said I wouldn’t.”
The words are the same, but they feel different in daylight. Less like something said in the immediate wreckage of what happened and more like something meant to hold after the fact. Something with weight behind it.
I nod once, and when I shift, my body reminds me all at once of everything I managed to set aside just long enough to sleep.
The ache returns sharper than before. My shoulder protests.
My wrists throb. My ribs feel bruised all the way through.
Lower still, a deeper pain settles in, not sharp now but heavy and unavoidable, impossible to separate from memory even when I try.
My hand stills against him. Of course he notices.
“How do you feel?” he asks.
I let out a breath that almost passes for a laugh if a laugh had been dragged through broken glass first.
“I don’t know.”
It’s the only honest answer I have. My body hurts.
My mind feels both too full and strangely hollow, and the space between those two things makes it hard to settle anywhere.
Part of me wants to stay exactly where I am, unmoving, unthinking, letting nothing else in.
Another part feels like if I stay still too long, everything will catch up at once and I won’t be able to hold the line when it does.
“That was…” I begin, and then stop because the words don’t come. Not because I don’t have them. Because I have too many, and none of them fit around the shape of what happened without sounding smaller than it deserves or uglier than I can bear to hear out loud.
I don’t force them. He doesn’t push. He simply waits, watching me with that same steady, unsettling attention, leaving the choice where it belongs.
I exhale slowly, my fingers curling a little more firmly into the fabric near his wrist as my gaze drifts away from him and out across the room.
The bed. The windows. The chair. The closed door.
Morning light laid cleanly over everything.
Quiet. Still. Safe enough for now. Then my eyes return to him.
“I don’t want to go back there,” I say.
Not the cabin. Not the woods. Not even my farm, not yet.
Not anywhere that can be entered and broken open that easily, not anywhere that still has their footprints in it.
The admission settles heavier than I expect, and something shameful flickers through me with it.
Briar Hollow is mine. I built it. I fought for every acre, every enclosure, every weathered board and wire fence and bucket and feed bin.
The idea of not wanting to go back feels like betrayal. But it is still true.
“You won’t,” he says.
He doesn’t hesitate. The certainty in his voice cuts through everything else, no doubt, no pause, and I find myself searching his face, not because I don’t believe him, but because I need to understand how he can sound so sure.
I don’t ask. Not yet. Instead, I nod, small but real, and push myself up more carefully against the pillows.
The movement is slow and deliberate. My body resists, but I do it anyway.
I move, and that matters. My breathing steadies by a fraction more, and for the first time since waking, I don’t feel entirely trapped inside the memory of the night before.
Then the thought hits. My animals.
I go still, my breath catching as panic takes on a different shape. Not the cabin. Not the table. Briar Hollow. The barn. The aviary. The enclosures. Water buckets. Feed schedules. Locked gates. Creatures who did not ask to depend on me and do anyway.
“My animals,” I say, urgency cutting through everything else. “I left them. I didn’t…”
I am already trying to think ahead, to calculate, to fix it, to build the missing hours into something manageable.
“I have to go back.”
“You won’t.”
This time the certainty in his voice cuts the other way. I turn toward him fully.
“I have to,” I say again, sharper now. “They need—”
“They’re being handled.”
The words stop me just long enough to keep me from spiraling. I stare at him.
“I sent people before we left the forest,” he says. “Your property is secured. Your animals are being fed. The enclosures are being checked.”
The information lands slowly, like my mind has to force itself to process something that should be simple. Not home. Not yet. But not abandoned either. My throat tightens on the relief of it.
“They’re not easy animals,” I say after a moment, quieter now. “You can’t just send anyone in there.”
“I didn’t.”
He means it. I can see that. Not because he softens the claim or dresses it up, but because he doesn’t. He says it like fact. Like the question has already been answered in every direction that matters.
Something in my chest eases so abruptly it almost hurts. Then another thought comes hard on the heels of the first.
“The raccoon.”
I push myself more upright despite the protest that tears through my body. “I picked it up before. At the rescue. I didn’t finish intake. If it was still in the crate—”
“It wasn’t.”
I stop. My gaze snaps back to him.
“The animal was retrieved alive,” he says. “It’s back at the rescue.”
I stare at him.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
No hesitation. No hedging. No attempt to calm me with something he isn’t certain of.
Something inside me loosens all at once. The raccoon is alive. Not forgotten. Not left behind to die because I did. I exhale slowly, my shoulders dropping.
“You handled all of that.”
“Yes.”
I look down at my hands. Cleaner now. Still raw. Still mine.
“You didn’t have to.”
“I did.”
Again, no performance. No false modesty. No expectation attached to it. Just certainty. It should frustrate me, maybe. The way he says things as if they become true the second he speaks them. But right now it only leaves me quiet.
I lean back into the pillows. The weight of everything is still there, the ache, the memory, the sick heaviness of what was done to me, but this part has changed.
My animals are safe. The raccoon is safe.
Briar Hollow isn’t whole without me, but it isn’t abandoned either. For now, that has to be enough.
The quiet settles again, not empty and not as heavy as before, just still.
My body sinks more fully into the mattress now that the sharpest edge of panic has eased, and the room feels clearer somehow, like something inside me has shifted just enough to let it exist without pressing in on me from all sides.
Then my stomach growls. The sound is low at first, almost easy to ignore, until it happens again, louder this time, sharp enough to pull me fully out of my own head. It catches me off guard in a way nothing else has, and for one ridiculous second all I can do is stare.