12. Stellan
STELLAN
She kissed me.
The thought keeps circling through my mind like a prayer I can't stop repeating.
Twenty-four hours since she stood in front of me in the sunset light and put her hand on my chest and told me I could touch her.
Twenty-four hours since I finally stopped fighting and let myself have something I've wanted for months.
Twenty-four hours of counting her smiles, her touches, the way she looks at me like I'm something worth wanting.
She kissed me. She pulled me closer when I tried to retreat. She said she deserved me.
And I let her believe it.
The guilt sits heavy in my chest as I watch her across the mess hall, talking with Kira and Eliza, her laugh carrying across the space like music.
She thinks she knows me now. Thinks the berserker attack and the blood and the violence were the worst of what I am.
Thinks she's seen the monster and accepted him.
But she doesn't know the whole truth yet.
She knows pieces, fragments I've offered during our morning conversations.
She knows my sister died. She knows I count to seven to remember her.
She knows something terrible happened when I was seventeen, something that broke something inside me that's never healed.
She doesn't know what I did. What I am. What Mira saw that made her stop looking at me like I was her hero.
If I'm going to do this, if I'm going to let Esmerelda into my life the way she's asking to be let in, she needs to know everything. She needs to understand exactly what kind of monster she's choosing.
Then, if she still wants me, maybe I'll let myself believe I deserve it.
Ifind her after dinner, sitting alone in a quiet corner of the temporary common room with a book in her lap. She's not really reading, I can tell. Her eyes are unfocused, her expression soft and distant, and when she sees me approaching, she smiles in a way that makes my chest ache.
"Stellan."
"Can we talk?" The words come out rougher than I intend. "Somewhere private?"
Her smile fades slightly, not disappearing but shifting into something more careful. She closes her book and sets it aside, then rises to her feet with the fluid grace that characterizes everything she does.
"Of course."
I lead her outside, to the same spot where we kissed yesterday.
The sun has already set, stars beginning to appear against the deep purple sky, and the desert air is cool against my skin.
It's quiet here, far enough from the reconstruction noise and the clusters of brothers that we won't be overheard.
She doesn't ask what this is about. Doesn't push or probe or try to fill the silence with questions. She just waits, patient as always, giving me space to find my words.
"I need to tell you something," I finally say. "Before this goes any further. Before we become whatever we're becoming."
"Okay." Her voice is soft, steady. No fear, no judgment. Just acceptance.
I take a breath. Count to seven. And then I begin.
"I had a sister. Mira." The name feels strange on my tongue after all these years of only speaking it at her grave.
"She was three years younger than me. Small for an orc, took after our mother's human side.
She had these little tusks, barely visible, and a gap between her front teeth that showed when she smiled. "
Esmerelda doesn't say anything. Just listens.
"She was everything to me. When we were kids, I taught her to ride a bike.
I scared off the bullies who called her names for being half-human.
I made her laugh just to see that gap-tooth smile.
" My voice catches, and I have to pause, breathing through the pain.
"We had this secret language, hand signals we invented when we were young.
Too silly for anyone else to see. I haven't used it in fifteen years. "
"Stellan." My name, soft and aching, but she doesn't try to interrupt. Doesn't try to comfort. Just acknowledges the weight of what I'm sharing.
"When I was seventeen, we were walking home from school. A group of human teenagers cornered us in an alley. Four of them. They were shouting slurs, shoving Mira, calling her things I won't repeat. One of them had a knife."
I close my eyes, and even now, fifteen years later, I can see it. The fear in Mira's eyes. The hatred in theirs. The moment when one of them grabbed her arm and she cried out in pain.
"Something broke in me. I didn't even know what it was, then. Didn't know about the morveth, didn't know what I carried in my blood. I just knew that they were hurting my sister, and then there was red, and then there was nothing."
Esmerelda's hand finds mine in the darkness. Small and warm, grounding me.
"I killed them. All four of them. With my bare hands." The words taste like ash. "I was seventeen years old, and I killed four people, and I don't remember any of it. I just remember the red, and then waking up surrounded by bodies with Mira screaming."
Her grip on my hand tightens, but she doesn't pull away.
"She saw me. After. Standing there covered in blood, not recognizing her for a full thirty seconds because I was still coming back from wherever the beast had taken me. And when I finally did see her, when I finally understood what I'd done, the look on her face?—"
I have to stop. Count to seven again. Force myself to keep going.
"She looked at me like I was a stranger. Like I was the monster, not the people who had been hurting her. And she was right to look at me that way, because I was. I am."
"You protected her," Esmerelda says softly.
"I terrified her. I broke something between us that couldn't be fixed.
" I open my eyes, meeting her gaze in the starlight.
"For the next two years, she flinched every time I moved too fast. She stopped hugging me.
Stopped talking to me unless she had to.
We lived in the same house, but we stopped existing in the same world. "
"Two years?"
"That's how long she lived after. Two years of silence, of trying to apologize, of watching her become a ghost right in front of me. And then she got sick."
I tell her the rest. The leukemia. The treatments that didn't work.
The months of watching my sister fade away while she still couldn't bring herself to look at me.
Being at her bedside in the end, watching her reach for my hand and then pull back, a reflex she couldn't control even as she was dying.
"Her last words to me were nothing," I say, and my voice breaks on the confession. "She died without speaking to me. Without forgiving me. Without ever understanding that I was still me, that I loved her, that I would have done anything to take back that day."
The tears come, hot and shameful, and I try to turn away but Esmerelda won't let me. She steps closer, reaching up to cup my face, forcing me to look at her.
"I'm sorry," she says, and there's no pity in her voice. Just compassion. Just understanding. "I'm so sorry, Stellan."
"I never got to tell her." The words are ragged, torn from somewhere deep.
"That I was sorry. That I was still her brother.
That I would have let those humans kill me before I let them hurt her if I'd had any choice in what happened.
But I didn't have a choice. The beast took over, and I killed them, and I lost her anyway. "
"You didn't lose her because of what you did." Esmerelda's thumbs trace my cheekbones, wiping away tears I don't bother hiding. "You lost her because she was a child who saw something terrifying, something she couldn't understand. That's not your fault."
"Isn't it?"
"No." Her voice is firm, certain. "What happened wasn't something you chose. You couldn't control the morveth any more than you could control the fact that those boys decided to hurt her. You were seventeen, Stellan. You didn't know what you were. You just knew your sister was in danger."
"And I killed four people."
"You stopped four people from hurting someone you loved." She holds my gaze, unflinching. "That's not the same thing as murder. That's protection. That's love."
I want to believe her. Want to let her words wash away fifteen years of guilt and shame and the constant, aching absence of my sister's voice. But the wound is too old, too deep, carved into the center of who I am.
"I don't know how to let this go," I admit. "I've been carrying it for so long that I don't know who I am without it."
"Then don't let it go." The words surprise me. "Don't try to fix it or erase it or pretend it didn't happen. Just let it be part of you, alongside everything else. The guilt and the grief and the love you still have for her."
"You're not going to try to fix it?"
She almost smiles, something sad and knowing in her expression. "I can't bring her back. I can't erase what happened. All I can do is be here, with you, right now. And that has to be enough, because it's all I have to offer."
I stare at her, this woman who keeps surprising me. Every instinct I have expected her to try to heal me, to offer solutions and comfort and the particular kind of helping that defines her entire life. Instead, she's just present. Witnessing. Accepting.
"That's enough?" My voice is barely a whisper.
"That's everything." She takes my hands, bringing them to her lips, pressing kisses to my scarred knuckles.
"You're not the monster you think you are.
Mira was a child who saw something terrifying, something no child should ever have to see.
But you're not just that moment, Stellan.
You're every moment since. Every time you've chosen not to be the beast. Every brother you've protected, every battle you've fought for people who couldn't fight for themselves.
Fifteen years of controlling something that wants to consume you. "
"What if I can't choose forever?" The fear is old and familiar, the question I've asked myself every day since I was seventeen. "What if one day the beast wins and I hurt someone I love?"
"Then I'll be here to call you back." She steps closer, wrapping her arms around my waist, pressing her face against my chest. "Just like I did in the attack. Just like I will every time you need me to."
I hold her. This small, warm, impossibly stubborn woman who refuses to run no matter how many times I tell her she should.
She fits against me perfectly, her softness against my hardness, her steadiness against my chaos.
She knows the worst thing about me now. Knows the moment that defines my entire life, the guilt I've never been able to escape, the sister I failed to save even as I tried to protect her.
And she's still here.
"I don't deserve you," I say into her hair.
"Stop saying that." Her voice is muffled against my shirt. "You deserve everything good, Stellan. You've just spent so long punishing yourself that you've forgotten how to accept it."
"I don't know how to do this. Any of it. I've never let anyone this close."
"Then learn." She pulls back to look at me, her warm brown eyes steady and sure. "Let me teach you. Let me show you what it's like to be loved without conditions, without earning it, without having to prove you deserve it every single day."
"That's not how love works."
"That's exactly how love works." She reaches up to touch my face, tracing the scars that map my history. "At least, it's how I love. Completely. Stubbornly. Even when the person I love doesn't believe they're worth it."
The word hangs in the air between us. Love. Neither of us has said it outright, not yet, but it's there in every touch, every look, every moment of patient understanding.
"Esmerelda." Her name feels like a prayer. "I'm terrified."
"Good." She smiles, and it's like sunrise breaking over the desert. "That means it matters."
She kisses me then, standing on her toes to reach, her hands pulling me down to meet her.
This kiss is different from yesterday's, deeper, more certain.
There's nothing tentative about it, nothing held back.
She kisses me like she knows exactly what she wants, and what she wants is me, all of me, including the parts I've spent fifteen years trying to hide.
When we break apart, I'm breathing hard, and the beast in my chest is purring with contentment.
"Stay with me tonight," she says. "Not for anything except being together. I just want to fall asleep next to you."
I should say no. Should maintain some distance, some protection against the inevitable moment when she realizes I'm too broken to keep. But I'm tired of distance. Tired of protection. Tired of being alone when the woman I'm falling for is standing in front of me, asking me to stop.
"Okay," I say. "Okay."
Her smile widens, and she takes my hand, leading me back toward the compound. The stars are fully out now, scattered across the sky like diamonds, and somewhere inside, our friends are probably wondering where we've gone.
Let them wonder. For the first time in fifteen years, I'm exactly where I'm supposed to be.