Chapter 45
Rafe
I’m halfway through tying my boots when it happens. A cold sweep down my spine. Not a chill, or a draft, something deeper like a thread inside me tugging wrong.
My hand stills, one still knotted in the laces as I stare into nothing.
A memory.
Old and dusty frayed around the edges.
Sam and me. His shitty little flat above the old market with an empty bottle of mead. Cards between us, laughing so hard my ribs hurt. Talking about nothing and everything because there’s no war yet, or so I thought, so no reason to waste the night.
It was one of the last times I saw him before everything went to shit.
Wasn’t it?
I swallow hard, my mind not my own. Hollow.
The memory flickers for a second. The cards scatter, the warmth of the fire dims and the burn of alcohol turns flat.
I shake my head trying to chase it, reaching for the exact way the smoke of the fire curled around us that night, but further it goes. Like sand between my fingers.
New images slot in its place—his flat, a figure under the blankets. Sam at the door, his grin too tight, his voice breathless after spending his night with a lover.
I never saw her face and I never asked.
It plants itself like it were always there. Settling into a place it doesn’t belong but somehow fits too well. A sick kind of vertigo shudders through me. I run a hand over my face, trying to steady the ground beneath my feet, but it’s already moved.
I can still hear the old version. Sam’s laugh. My voice slurring as we put the world to rights.
As I breathe, it becomes nothing more than an echo. A faint murmur. Soon to be gone completely. I sit back on my heels, bootlaces half-done, breathing shallow. My head’s been cracked open like someone’s rewiring me from the inside out.
Grabbing a quill and parchment, I close my eyes, trying to trace the night. Where did it start? Did I bring the mead or did Sam always have it? Who won the last hand of cards? What were the stakes?
Fuck!
The answers smear like smudged ink.
But I remember the door. His voice. The figure in his bed. A lover, he said. I rake a hand through my hair. My skin prickles as minutes tick by. The mark on my palm dull, no glow, no heat. But the shift’s real. It’s in my bones. In my veins.
My soul.
I reach for the old memory again out of spite, out of stubbornness, but it’s gone.
My pulse pounds in my throat, and a sour taste floods my mouth. I glance around my cabin like maybe it’ll answer for me.
Same. Everything’s the same. Nothing out of place, but it feels like it is. I’m out of place. I feel like a man walking over thin ice with no idea how deep the water runs.
A once cherished memory now re-written to another night spent alone.