CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
WINTER
His question hangs between us as I push open his bedroom door, the old hinges groaning softly beneath my hand before the room slowly reveals itself around us.
I pause again at the threshold…because I can.
Because every step I take beyond this point belongs entirely to me.
No one is forcing me forward. No unseen hand is steering me where it wants me to go.
I am moving because I have chosen to move.
The last four years have been measured by other people’s decisions.
Where I slept, when I ate, when I spoke…
when I didn’t. Even my future had never truly belonged to me, well before I was taken.
Parceled out by hands that never once thought to ask what I wanted.
Not anymore.
I’d imagined this room a thousand different ways over the past week.
Larger. Colder. Somewhere between a mausoleum and a sanctuary.
Instead, it’s simply…his. Worn books are stacked with little regard for order.
Timber darkened with age. A bed made so perfectly it looks untouched that I wonder if he ever sleeps in it at all.
There are no photographs in here. No keepsakes.
Nothing that says another soul has ever been invited beyond this doorway.
The loneliness settles around me before I ever look back at him.
Everything has its place, yet nothing about this room feels lived in.
I was too afraid to come in here before now, as though this one space in the house was sacred because it belonged only to him.
Though now that I have seen it, I can tell it only exists as a shelter.
A place for him to rest between jobs. He leaves before the sun is up and arrives home in the dark.
What little time he spends beneath this roof, it isn’t spent in this bedroom.
And somehow, that tells me more about him than anything else I’ve discovered over the last four years.
A bedroom meant for dreaming, belonging to someone who has forgotten how to dream at all.
I cross the room one slow step at a time, feeling each footfall against the timber beneath my bare feet, like I’m reclaiming something that had been stolen piece by piece. This isn’t about the bedroom. It’s about him. My choice. Mine.
Every breath I take is my own. Every thought since I got here was mine too.
If I continue, it will be because no one but me decided I should.
I reach for the edge of his bed before turning to face him, finding him exactly where I’d left him, still standing in the doorway.
Like crossing it without permission would somehow ruin this.
It might.
It might not.
All I know is, it’s been a long time since I’ve felt remotely close to the woman I hid away inside my mind.
The woman I believed was worthy of protecting when no one else thought so.
It was me who saved her. It was me who kept her calm in times of crisis and chaos.
Of pain and torment. When I’d beg to be freed, to be rescued.
When I begged for this man to come and take me from this life.
But he didn’t. So I saved her instead. I became the person I’d spent years praying would find me in the only way I knew how to.
And now that Death is standing no more than an arms length away from me, I realize I no longer need saving.
I simply want him to know the woman who survived before I take my final breath.
The one who stitched herself back together in the dark when no one came. The one who refused to let them win.
They will not win.
They’ve taken way too much from me, they don’t get to anymore and I realize that now that I’m no longer with them.
The week I’ve had away from the farm has taught me that.
Everything I do from this moment forward belongs to me.
Every step I take. Every thought that I have.
Every touch. No one is taking anything from me anymore.
Because I am safe with him. I know it deep in my bones.
I smile, small but certain, before lifting my head toward him.
“Come here,” I whisper.
He doesn’t move immediately. His brows draw together, the faintest crease appearing between them, like he’s trying to understand what it is I have asked of him. Like he’s searching my face for the answer. Hesitation I know that isn’t there.
“Ghost…” The word leaves him, half warning, half plea as he slowly shakes his head. “Are you sure?”
Reaching out, I grip his hand again, my fingers slipping easily between his as I guide him over to the edge of his bed.
He follows without resistance, though every movement isn’t a sure one.
As if he believes he isn’t deserving of such affection.
As if he believes he isn’t deserving of me.
When the backs of his legs brush the mattress, I rest my hands lightly against his broad chest, gently guiding him down.
His jaw tightens, and his gaze never leaves mine as he slowly lowers himself onto the edge of the bed.
Only then do I step between his knees, my hands finding the collar of his leather jacket.
My fingers ease it from his shoulders, peeling the worn leather away inch by inch until it slides down his large arms and falls heavily into my hands.
The weight of it surprises me. The blood doesn’t.
Crimson stains almost every inch of the black leather, some still wet enough to glisten beneath the soft light spilling into the room from the hallway, the metallic scent lingering between us.
I drape it carefully over the end of the bed before looking back at him.
His face is clean now. The blood I wiped away downstairs is gone, leaving nothing behind to distract me from the man beneath it.
And God. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything so heartbreakingly beautiful.
Strong enough to terrify anyone who looked at him.
Gentle enough to let me undress him one careful moment at a time.
The sharp line of his jaw. The amber eyes watching me as though I might disappear if he blinked.
The exhaustion settled so deeply into the planes of his face that I wonder when he last allowed himself to simply exist instead of survive.
If such a man is even capable of something as mundane as humanity.
He wears guilt far heavier than he wears the blood.
How every movement is restrained. Every breath measured before he allows himself to take it.
Every inch of distance between us left entirely in my hands, like he no longer trusts himself to decide where he should stand.
He has surrendered every choice to me without ever asking anything in return.
Even now, sitting on the edge of his own bed, he looks far more innocent than a man whose job is to take lives.
“You don’t have to do this.” His voice is rougher than I’ve ever heard it to be. Quieter. “Not with a man like me.”
A sad smile finds my lips. He still doesn’t understand.
He thinks this is about him. About the blood staining his clothes.
About the men I’ve witnessed him bury six feet beneath the snow-covered earth.
The lives he’s taken. He thinks I’m standing here despite those things, when the truth is I’m standing here because of everything I’ve seen beneath them.
The man who has never once touched me without giving me the chance to pull away.
The man who carries the weight of every terrible thing he’s ever done as though punishing himself somehow makes the world a fairer place.
The man who still believes I deserve someone better, while failing to see that all I’ve ever wanted was someone who made me feel safe. Safe enough to choose.
I am not the sum of what was done to me.
They don’t get to have that. I am the woman who survived.
The woman who gathered every fragile piece they tried to break of me with trembling hands and chose to keep living, even when living hurt more than any death ever could.
And if this ends the way I have always believed it would…
If one day he is the one who walks me into whatever waits beyond this life, then at least I will know that, for a little while, the final chapter of my story belonged to me. That my end was finally mine to write.
“You’ve spent this entire week trying to protect me from yourself,” I whisper. “Has it ever occurred to you that I’ve spent it trying to find my way to you?” I brush my fingertips gently across his jaw, searching his eyes and only finding the war raging behind them.
“I’ve stared life in the face, and it broke me into pieces.
With hands that felt like claws. With booted feet that did nothing good.
With voices that convinced me I was worth less than the dirt beneath them.
I’ve lived through the kind of darkness not even you could imagine.
I am not afraid of you. I am not afraid of my death, and if that means there’s something about me that isn’t right, then maybe the part of me the world tried so hard to break is the very reason I’m perfect for you. ”
A truth. My truth. One that leaves him staring at me like I have just undone everything he thought he knew.
My fingers sweep slowly beneath his eyes, tracing away wounds no one else can see.
His eyes drift away from mine, unable to hold my gaze for long.
I gently guide his face back toward me. “You think you’re darkness?
” My hands tremble ever so slightly against his skin.
“I think you’ve simply spent too long standing in it that you’ve forgotten it was never who you were. ”
Something inside him shatters. I see it.
In the way his throat works around words that refuse to come.
In the way his breathing falters beneath my hands, and how his eyes search mine.
Like he’s trying to understand how a woman like me is standing here in his bedroom.
His forehead falls against mine, his eyes closing as though the effort of holding himself together has finally become too much.
“I don’t know how to do this.”
I wait, and when he finally speaks again, his voice is barely more than a whisper.
“I’ve never…” He lets out a quiet, humorless laugh. “I’ve never done this before.”
My heart aches at his admission. Because a man like him should have been loved long before now.
He should have known what it felt like to be looked at without fear.
To be touched without expectation and to have someone choose him without asking him to become something first. Instead, life had made him a killer.
Just as it had made me something I was never supposed to become.
“Neither have I,” I murmur, watching as his eyes widen in surprise, searching mine for the lie in them, or trying to decide if he’d heard me correctly, I’m not so sure.
“You’re a virgin?”
Heat floods my face, and I look away before he can mistake it for anything else.
The question catches something inside me, and my gaze involuntarily drops to the floor, shame blooming beneath my skin for reasons that shouldn’t exist. Not because of the question itself, but because the answer belongs to monsters who never deserved to have it.
A silence settles between us, his fingers slipping from beneath my chin, not to pull away, but to give me the space to do the same if I wanted.
“It’s okay,” he says quietly. “You don’t need to hide from me. You don’t need to tell me anything you don’t want to.” He gently brushes the back of my hand, and my eyes lift back to his. There is no judgement waiting for me there. Only patience.
“Tell me your name?” I say the words before I can stop myself.
They linger between us like something fragile.
Something honest. Until now, he’d only been Death.
A shadow wandering forgotten graves. A dark angel draped in black.
A silent promise whispered into the night whenever I begged the universe to send him a message.
To tell him to find me and to take me away.
I know there are many names for him. A different name.
A different face. A different story. But I’d never stopped to wonder whether the man sitting before me had been given one of his own.
“Raven. Raven King.”