Chapter 9
Nina
The carving knife moves in his hands by the fire, pale curls dropping onto the cloth across his knee.
He's been at it for twenty minutes. I've been at the kitchen counter with my coffee going cold, watching his hands instead of the textbook open in front of me, working up the nerve to ask the question I've been sitting on since last night.
He told me about the pits. The muzzle. The handlers who called him by a number.
He told me in pieces, over two days, each word dragged up through scar tissue and laid on the kitchen table between us like bone fragments he'd been carrying in his pockets for years.
I listened the way I listen to patients in post-op who need to talk before the morphine drip takes them under.
Without flinching. Without the pity he kept bracing for, his shoulders drawing in each time he offered up a new detail, waiting for me to break.
I didn't break. I'm a trauma nurse. I know what survivors look like, and I know the difference between someone who needs saving and someone who already saved himself and needs to be seen.
But there's one thing he hasn't told me.
"Why do people call you Gore?"
The knife stops.
His grip tightens on the block of wood. The purr that's been running low in his chest cuts out.
I wait.
The cabin creaks under a gust of wind. I don't repeat the question. I don't fill the silence with reassurance or an out. He'll answer or he won't, and either way I'll still be sitting here in the morning.
"The handlers." His voice scrapes out of him, gravel dragged over rust. "They gave the fighters ring names. Mine was Gore." His thumb runs along the edge of the blade without pressing. "A product label. I didn't choose it."
My coffee has gone cold. I don't move.
"Knox asked me once if I wanted a different name. When he patched me in." Garrett's gaze stays on the wood in his hands. "But I kept the name Gore. If I threw it away, they'd still own it. This way it's mine."
My chest cracks clean down the centre.
I set the mug on the counter. I cross the room and lower myself to the floor beside his chair, my back against the base of the rocker, my shoulder touching his knee. I don't reach for him. I don't say anything. I press my shoulder into his leg.
His hand drops from the carving and rests on the top of my head. His fingers settle into my hair. The purr starts again, faint, rougher than usual.
We sit like that until the fire needs feeding.
He feeds it. Two logs, the bark catching, the flames climbing. Then he settles back into the rocker and picks up the block of wood and the knife. The blade moves again. Small, precise strokes, and I watch from the floor beside his knee as the last of the shape emerges.
He holds it out to me.
A hummingbird. Black walnut, the wings spread mid-flight, every feather carved so fine I can feel the barbs under my fingertip.
I told him once, tossed it out while talking about my grandmother's kitchen.
The hummingbirds that came to the feeder outside her window every morning.
He remembered. He carved it with hands the world taught him were built for damage.
The weight of it fills my palm. My throat closes because the man who just told me he was Number Seven, a product label, a thing that belonged to a fighting ring—that man sat by this fire for a week and made me a bird.
"Thank you." My voice comes out rough. I don't trust it with anything more than that.
I push myself up off the floor, the hummingbird still in my hand, and climb into his lap.
The rocker groans under both of us. His hands hover at his sides for a second, uncertain, and then I press my mouth to his and his arms come around me.
He kisses me back slow and careful, the way he does everything, and I curl into him with my face against his neck and his chin resting on the top of my head.
He's warm. He's always warm. The fire crackles and the snow taps the window and his arms tighten around me and the purr deepens until I feel it in my sternum.
I set the hummingbird on the windowsill above the sink where the light will catch it.
It's Christmas Eve in a cabin in Oregon, and the whole place smells like my Abuela’s tamales.
I haven't made these since Tucson. Since the kitchen on Calle de la Luna with the cracked tile floor and the hummingbird feeder bolted to the window frame, where Abuela stood me on a stool at five years old and taught me to spread masa with the back of a spoon.
Corn husk soaking in the sink, the chili paste staining my fingertips red, and the cabin filling up with a smell that drags me straight back to Mami's kitchen every time.
The record player turns. Handel's Messiah. Garrett put it on without being asked.
Pine boughs hang over the doorframes because I dragged them in from the yard yesterday and Garrett stood at the counter watching me wrestle a six-foot branch through the front door without offering to help, because he knows I'd rather do it wrong than have it done for me.
Candles from the general store line the windowsills.
Pinecones from outside sit on a plate on the side table.
Jess came over earlier with a strand of lights and stayed for coffee while I strung them across the bookshelf.
She sat at the kitchen counter with her boots hooked on the rung of the stool and her hands wrapped around the mug I gave her. She spotted the hummingbird on the windowsill. Picked it up, turned it in her palms, and her whole face changed.
"Knox made Sarah's headboard by hand. Finn's not the carving type, but he rebuilt the nursery floor on his knees in two days because I said the boards creaked." She grinned. "Must be a thing. These monster men and working with their hands."
"Finn's not subtle about it, is he?"
Jess snorted. "Finn's never been subtle about anything in his life.
Except how scared he'd be as a dad." She touched her stomach, the curve barely visible under her shirt.
"Now he reads the baby books out loud in bed.
To the baby. Through my belly button." She laughed, and the sound cracked open, wet and fierce and full of a love she still looked surprised to carry, and I watched the combat medic who swore she'd never let anyone in sitting in my kitchen five months pregnant with a hand on her belly and an expression that undid me.
I looked away first. She set the hummingbird back on the windowsill.
By evening, Garrett sets a plate at the end of the table beside mine. He reaches across and moves the hummingbird from the windowsill to the table, placing it next to my glass like it belongs there. His hand retreats to his lap.
I pick it up. The firelight catches the grain of the wood. My throat tightens the same way it did this morning when he first put it in my hand.
I open my mouth to say something and a car pulls into the clearing.
A black sedan, its headlights cutting through the falling snow and sweeping across the kitchen window before the engine dies.
Two men climb out. I see them through the glass above the sink, the porch light throwing their shadows long across the snow. The older one matches Garrett's description of the scout from the bar. The younger is built like a bouncer. They stand at the tree line. They don't approach.
Garrett moves past me before I can speak.
The front door opens and shuts. Cold air rolls through the kitchen, lifting the candle flames, and I set the carving down on the table and follow him out to the porch.
He's already crossing the clearing. No hurry.
No sound except the crunch of his boots on the frozen ground and the wind in the firs overhead.
He stops ten feet from the two men. His frame shifts.
The change is subtle, nothing theatrical, a redistribution of weight that drops his centre of gravity and widens his stance.
His shoulders settle. His chin lowers, and the horns angle forward, and the man who carved me a hummingbird disappears.
What stands in the open is the thing they made him in the pits.
The guy who'd been smiling isn't smiling anymore.
The younger man takes a step back, his heel catching on an exposed root, and he rights himself.
The snow falls between them and the cold bites through my shirt and I can't breathe.
I have never been afraid of Garrett. I'm not afraid of him now.
But I understand, for the first time, why other people are.
He speaks. One word.
"Leave."
His voice drops through the clearing like a stone through ice.
The older man opens his mouth. Garrett takes one step forward.
The snow compresses under his boot and the scout flinches, a full-body jerk he can't hide, and the younger man is already moving toward the driver's side door.
They're in the car in under ten seconds.
The tires spin on the icy gravel, catch, and the sedan fishtails down the forest road and disappears into the dark.
I stand on the steps with my arms wrapped around myself against the cold and I look at the man in the clearing and I understand, in my body, not my head, what the world sees when it looks at him.
The predator. The pit fighter. The creature who could tear a man apart and the crowd would cheer.
I see it. And my first thought isn't fear.
It's: that's the same man who cried in my arms. That's the same man who carved me a bird from black walnut with his hands shaking and set it beside my plate without a word.
Both things are true. Both things are him.
He turns. His shoulders are still low, his chin still angled forward, and then he sees me on the steps and the whole posture breaks. His hands close. His chin lifts. The horns tilt back. My man returns.
I walk down the porch steps.
The cold hits my legs through my jeans and my breath clouds between us. I take his hand. His fingers swallow mine, his palm fever-warm against the December air, and I pull.