Chapter 15 #2
Rosa whimpered into my neck. I cupped one hand over the back of her helmet and began, slowly, to skate backward. Away from the house. Away from the porch. Toward the far side of the pond—drawing his line of travel out across the middle.
The middle, where I’d told my kitling the ice was thin.
“You should put that away,” I said. My voice came out level. Miles beneath it, my Kteer was not humming anymore. It was a wall of low, black sound. “Before you hurt yourself.”
“Before I—” He laughed, delighted, and took another sliding step out. Twenty-five feet. “It talks! It gives advice!” The laugh shut off like a tap. “Did you put your hands on my wife, beast?”
I said nothing. Skated back another slow stride. He followed.
“I’ve thought about it, you know. Ever since I saw that broadcast. My wife.
My daughter.” His lip curled off his teeth.
“Sitting in the stands wearing an animal’s name.
Tell me—” another step, twenty feet now, his soles skidding, the gun never wavering, “—did that whore spread her legs for your monster cock? Does she let it near my—”
“Don’t talk about my Mate and daughter like that.”
The growl from my lips was full of threat, and for half a heartbeat, something ancient and animalistic in Anthony’s hindbrain heard it and went pale. Then his madness swallowed the warning whole, and he laughed again, and kept coming.
“Yours.” He slid forward, gaining confidence with each step, out past the ring of gold light, out toward the dark heart of the pond.
“She’s not yours, beast. Nothing here is yours.
Oh, I saw the game—I saw how your kind delights in violence, smashing each other into walls while the crowd howls.
Is that the plan?” He spread his arms, gun and all, presenting himself.
“You’re going to use your violence on me?
In front of her? Go ahead. Show my daughter what you are. ”
I kept skating backward. Slow. Steady. Fifteen feet between us now, and beneath his next step, the ice sounded a note only I could hear—a soft, glassy tick, like a claw tapping on a window.
Come on, I thought at him, cold as the water under us. Keep coming, you rotted thing. Come to me.
“You know what else I saw on that broadcast?” His voice went sing-song, tender, and it was the worst sound I’d heard in two worlds. “My precious little girl. Up on the big screen. Cheering.” He tilted his head to try to peer at Rosa, and he smiled at her. “I’m here to take her home.”
Rosa shuddered against my neck. Not a word. My brave, chattering kitling, silent as snow, and for that alone I could have crossed the ice and ended him with my hands.
I didn’t. I retreated one more stride and let my voice carry flat across the pond. “She’s not going anywhere with you.”
“She’s not yours, you animal!” The mask tore. His face twisted, and there it was, the thing under the cologne and the coat—the rot, the debt, the cruelty that had chased my family across half a country. “She’s mine. My blood! My property, signed and promised, and I am going to make use of her—”
“I know exactly what you have planned for her, bastard.” I let the growl loose now, let it roll off the mountains, let it pull him. “You’ll never take her. You’ll never touch her. You will die never having touched her.”
It worked. Gods forgive me, it worked—his face went red with rage, and he came at me, fast, sliding steps eating the distance, straight across the dark middle of my pond, and beneath his shoes the ice ticked and ticked and—
Two things happened at once.
Rosa—my sweet, fearless, helpful girl—pushed back from my shoulder, twisted in my arms, and called out across the ice in her clear little bell of a voice:
“You gotta be careful, mister! The ice is thin there!”
And light spilled gold across the snow as the porch door banged open.
“Anthony!”
Sofia. On the porch in her socks, tea abandoned, book abandoned, her breath ragged white clouds, her fear hitting me across sixty feet like a fist through our bond. “Leave them alone! I’m the one you want—take me, I’m the one you want!”
“Wrong!” Anthony twisted toward her voice, and the gun swung with him, away from me, toward the porch, toward my Mate, and my heart stuttered—seized in my chest like a bad engine. “I need my daughter, bitch. You I just want dead—”
He planted his back foot to steady his aim.
The ice quit.
There was no crack of warning, no slow groan. The whole dark plate of it simply hinged beneath him with a sound like a snapped bone, and Anthony’s arms flew skyward, and the gun went off—crack crack crack, three shots straight up into the falling snow—and then the black water took him.
The splash was enormous. Rosa screamed. I clamped her face against my shoulder, turned her from it, and skated—hard driving strides for the porch, for the light, for Sofia already stumbling down the steps in her socks with her arms out.
“I have her—she’s safe—” I put Rosa into her mother’s arms and spun, planting myself between my family and the pond, chest heaving, every sense flung wide.
Behind me: sobbing, both of them, Sofia’s “hijita, I’ve got you” muffled against a small teal helmet.
Out on the pond: thrashing. Splashing. Curses in two languages, the wet slap of hands scrabbling at ice that broke away in plates at every grab. Three more shots split the night—wild, blind, skyward—and my ears tracked each round harmlessly into the high trees across the yard.
Then, quieter thrashing.
I stood on the snow-dusted grass at the edge of my property with my family at my back, and I watched the black hole in the middle of my pond, and I did not move.
Understand this: I could have tried.
Some corner of my mind laid it out with terrible clarity—a ladder from the garage, a rope, a blanket thrown flat across the ice.
And the same cold corner answered: the ice would not hold a quarter of my weight.
It hadn’t held his. Anyone who went out there would join him.
And the only souls on this mountain lightweight enough to try were the two pressed shaking against my back, and he had come here, to my home, in the dark, with a gun, to kill one of them and steal the other.
No.
The gods had built this pond. Let the gods have him.
The splashing weakened. Slowed. Somewhere in it his voice came apart—rage first, then bargaining, then nothing that was words at all, just wet, whooping breath, thinner and thinner, and the snow kept sifting down soft and gold through the porch lights, and the mountains stood black and eternal over all of it, and at some point, without any sound at all, the pond went still.
Steam curled off the open water. The snow began, gently, to fill in his footprints.
I exhaled for what felt like the first time since the wind had shifted, and turned to my family.
They were wrapped around each other on the bottom porch step, Rosa burrowed into her mother’s chest, Sofia rocking her, both of them crying, both of them whole, and my legs went out from under me.
I sank down and gathered them in, both of them, everything I had, my arms shaking—shaking, me, the Wall—and pressed my face into Sofia’s hair while my Kteer keened its relief and rage together into one long silent howl.
“He can’t—” Sofia’s voice was wrecked. “Dakvaar, is he—”
“Gone.” I said it plainly, for Rosa’s sake and for hers. “He’s gone, dkaar. He will never come near either of you again.”
She broke then, fully, and I held her through it, one hand splayed across Rosa’s small back, the snow landing in Sofia’s hair, until—far out front, down the mountain road—the first sirens rose thin against the night.
Jord. His network of friends and cousins and drinking buddies; the patrols he’d arranged with a rookie’s earnest thoroughness.
Someone up the road had heard shots and made a call, and the cavalry was already coming.
I thanked the gods for that ridiculous, loyal male and made a note to hug him the next time I saw him.
Gently, I tipped Sofia’s chin up. Her eyes were swollen, her lashes wet, and she was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.
“Dkaar. The police will need to know what happened here. All of it—him, the past, everything.” I brushed my thumb along her jaw. “May I tell your story? Or do you want to?”
She glanced down at Rosa—weighing how much truth her daughter’s small shoulders could carry—then dragged in a shaking breath and met my eyes.
“Together.” Her hand found mine and gripped hard. “It’s our story now. We tell it together.”
Together. The same way we’d face everything from this night on.
Boots crunched gravel at the side of the house; flashlight beams swept the snow; a voice called out identifying itself as the law, and I rose, lifting them both with me, my Mate tucked under one arm and my daughter in the other, and carried my family up the steps, balancing on my skates’ blades.
“Over here,” I called back, and my voice came out raspy, scraped raw by everything I’d nearly lost and the overwhelming relief. “We’ll explain inside.”
Inside. Where it was warm, and there was cocoa for kitlings and tea gone cold that could be remade, and lamplight, and locks that no longer needed checking.
Inside, where my family was safe.
Home.