Chapter Thirty-Four
ONCE I KNEW Sawyer was safe, something happened in me that had never happened to me before, and it took me a moment to understand what it was.
It was the scared girl going away.
That dark nowhere I go, the place he built in me, the place where I get small and wait for it to be over. It just drained out of me, all at once. Because the thing that I came here to save was gone. There was nobody left to protect by being good.
And what came up into the empty space where the dark had been was not the girl in the hallway.
It was pure rage.
He was still talking. He’d been talking, that awful gentle voice, knew you’d come home, always knew, we can start over, you and me, nobody has to know, and he reached out to touch my hair, the purple ends of it, like he had a right, like it was his, like I was his.
And I hit him.
My hand just came up and cracked across his face hard enough that the sound bounced off the walls, and for one second neither of us moved.
I don’t think either of us believed it.
“No!” I snarled.
I was shaking, but I said it again.
“No. Don’t touch me.”
His hand dropped from his cheek.
I was crying now and too angry to care.
“You don’t get to call this home. You don’t get to stand there and act like I came back to you because I wanted to. I came because you had Sawyer.”
“Amy—”
“No!” Louder this time. “You listen to me for once.”
That shut him up. Maybe only because he couldn’t believe I’d said it.
“I got away from you. I built a life without you. I go to school. I have friends. I have people who love me and don’t make me scared all the time, and you don’t get any of that. You don’t get to touch it just because you found me.”
His face started to change.
I knew that look.
God, I knew it.
Once, that would’ve been enough. One little shift around his mouth and I would’ve stopped talking, stopped moving, stopped being anywhere he could reach.
Not now.
I wiped my face with the back of my hand.
“You had to take my best friend and beat him up just to get me in a room with you.” My voice broke, but I kept going. “That’s what you are now. Some sick old man who had to trick me into coming back because you knew I’d never choose you.”
The softness disappeared from his face.
I knew that change. I’d spent a childhood learning that change.
And I didn’t stop. That’s the thing I get to keep no matter what happens.
I saw the tenderness go out of his face and the other thing come into it, the thing that used to send me inside myself.
I stood there in front him my chin up and my fists clenched, not backing down.
“You always did have a mouth on you underneath,” he growled. “Just like her.”
And then he came at me.
I fought him.
I came up swinging and clawing and I got a knee into him and I got my nails down his face and I screamed, and none of it was enough, of course it wasn’t, he was twice my size, he got me by the throat and put me into the wall hard enough that the room went white.
And then the front of the house exploded inward.
* * *
I have never heard a sound like that door made.
It didn’t open. It came off the frame, wood cracking and sunlight pouring into the room, and through all of it came Rune.
I knew him before I could really see him. I was on the floor by then, half out of my head, my father’s hand still around my throat, but I knew the size of him, the way he moved, and for one stupid second all I could think was, He came.
Then I saw his face.
I had never seen Rune look like that.
There was nothing gentle left in him. Nothing of the man who worked in a garden or took my boots off when my feet hurt or lay awake half the night because I needed to hear him breathe.
He didn’t yell. He came through that doorway completely silent, looked at the hand around my throat, and went straight for my father.
The hand disappeared.
I hit the floor coughing, dragging air into a throat that didn’t want to work, and my father got maybe half a word out before Rune reached him.
Hands were on me. Not Rune’s, someone else, someone big and fast and gentle, Horse, it was Horse, down on his knees pulling me up and turning me away from the middle of the room, putting his own body between me and it, saying “I got you, darlin’, I got you, don’t look, come on now, up we go, don’t look,” and he got me up and moved me toward the blown-open door, and I let him.
I heard a loud crash and then another.
Then the noise inside the house stopped.
Horse went still beside me.
I looked at the broken doorway.
A few seconds later, Rune came out.
* * *
He came out with blood on him that wasn’t his.
For a second he didn’t see me. His chest was heaving, his hands were red, and he looked across the yard so fast that I knew exactly what he was looking for.
Three feet away.
His hands came up a little and stayed there, open at his sides, and that was when I saw they were shaking.
He looked at me, then at Horse’s arm around me, then back at my face, and he waited.
After everything he’d just done to get through that door, after finding my father’s hand around my throat, after whatever had happened in that room once Horse took me out, Rune stood three feet away from me and would not touch me until he knew I wanted him to.
Maybe he thought I was afraid of him now.
Maybe he thought I’d seen too much.
I looked at the blood on his hands and knew exactly what those hands had just done.
They were also the hands that worked dirt out of roots without breaking them. The hands that made tea for Brenda and took my boots off when my feet were swollen. The hands that had stopped the second I pushed against his chest and waited for me to put them back on my body myself.
I knew those hands. I knew him. So I stepped away from Horse.
Rune still didn’t move.
I crossed the three feet.
The second I put my arms around him, he broke. There’s no other word for it. His arms came around me, careful at first and then tighter when I held on, and his face went down into my hair while this awful shaking went through him.
“Amy.”
“I’m here.”
He pulled me closer. “I’ve got you.” His voice broke against my hair. “I’ve got you. Jesus Christ, I’ve got you.”
I pressed my face into his chest and held on. “I know.” His hand came up to the back of my head, and even then, with blood drying on his knuckles and both of us barely standing, he touched me gently. “I know you do,” I whispered. “You always did.”
He made a sound against my hair and held me harder.
I don’t know how long we stood there. Long enough for my breathing to slow. Long enough for the shaking in his arms to ease. Long enough for me to realize I was outside that house and I was never going back inside it.
The sun was up. Sawyer was safe. Horse was beside us. Somewhere behind me were a dozen men who had come when they knew I needed them.
And Rune had come.
I stood there in his arms with blood in my mouth and bruises already starting to hurt and his shirt twisted in both my fists, and I was still scared. I think some part of me probably would be for a long time.
But I wasn’t alone with it anymore.
I hadn’t been for a long time.
I just finally knew it.