We walk silently through the moss-draped oaks, Willow and Quinn preferring to travel through the trees above us. I can see Logan trying not to limp as each step jars his ribcage.
“Can you carry this for me?” I shove Melkin’s walking stick toward him. If he leans on the end that doesn’t slide into the ground, he can use it as a cane.
“Why?”
“Because I want to bring this back for Melkin’s wife.”
“You’re doing an admirable job of carrying it yourself.”
Stubborn, prideful man.
“But it was Melkin’s. And I no longer want to touch it.” I realize the words are true the moment they leave my mouth. I don’t want his walking stick. I don’t want to remember the bitter misery in his eyes as he asked me whether the Commander would spare his wife if he did as he was asked.
And I don’t want to remember the way he kept his knife pointed at the ground while I attacked him.
Logan takes the stick and points the dangerous end toward the sky. “Are we going to talk about Melkin?”
“No.”
“Let me rephrase that. What I meant to say is: We’re going to talk about Melkin.”
“No, we aren’t.”
We circle the base of a wide oak, its trunk gnarled and scarred, and head into a copse of pine trees. Willow tree-leaps ahead of us until she’s nothing but a distant flash of movement in the stillness of the forest. Quinn stays behind us, the occasional rustle of leaves the only reminder of his presence. The air warms gently as we walk, though the shadows still cling to their predawn chill.
“What happened to Melkin?”
“What part of ‘we aren’t going to talk about this’ is difficult to understand?”
His voice is gentle. “How can I help you, if you won’t tell me what happened?”
What happened? I felt hope. Burning, brilliant hope that turned to ash beside my father’s grave. I then killed my traveling companion for the crime of wanting desperately to save his wife. And I can’t feel anything but icy silence for all of it.
We leave the sharp-scented pine behind and enter a field of deep green grass spiked with wildflowers. Willow is already in the center of the field, an arrow notched, her head constantly swiveling, searching for threats. The sun is a fierce, unblinking eye above us, and I feel flushed from its heat.
“I know he was sent into the Wasteland to kill you and return the package to the Commander. His wife had the cell across from mine. She’s pregnant. That’s enough motivation to sway almost any man into doing the unthinkable.”
I can’t stand the heat prickling against my skin and reach to unfasten my cloak.
“What happened to your hands?”
The fastening sticks, and I tug at it desperately. He reaches out and captures my fingers in his.
“You have bloodstains on your hands.” His touch is gentle.
I want to slap his hand away and hear him condemn me. Tell me he’s changed his mind. Tell me he doesn’t love me now that he knows what I’ve done.
But he doesn’t know. Because I haven’t told him.
“Please,” he says.
I take a deep breath, hold on to those four beautiful words for one more moment—I love you, Rachel—and then I tell him.
“I killed him.” My voice sounds cold and empty as it echoes across the field of wildflowers. His hand tightens on mine.
“Why?” he asks. There’s no censure in his voice.
“Because I thought he was attacking me.”
“Then it was self-defense.”
“No.” Up ahead, water glitters beneath the morning sun, a piercing beauty that hurts my eyes. “No, it wasn’t.”
“Rachel, he was tasked with killing you once you found the package. It was self-defense.”
“He wasn’t going to kill me. I thought he was, but he wasn’t. He was trying to disarm me. Steal the package and leave me behind. Alive.” The words make me sick. I thought I’d feel relief to have it out in the open, but I don’t.
He’s quiet, though his fingers are still wrapped around mine as we approach the diamond-bright surface of a lake. Willow has tossed all but her undertunic aside and is wading into the water, her bow and arrow still clutched in her hands.
“If you thought he was trying to kill you, defending yourself is understandable, Rachel. I would’ve done the same.”
“No, you would’ve stopped.” I whirl to face him, suddenly desperate to make him see. “You’d have kept control. I know you.”
Beneath the steadiness of his gaze, pain lingers. “Like I kept control when the Commander backhanded you during the Claiming ceremony?”
“That’s not the same.”
“I fail to see the difference.” He steps close to me. “You were afraid. You knew you couldn’t let him take the device and bring it to the Commander. Instinct kicked in, and you did what you had to do.”
I shake my head. “You would’ve seen the signs, and stopped.”
“Sweetheart, you haven’t been reading people right since Oliver.”
My voice is a rough whisper. “And Dad.”
We’re at the edge of the lake. Logan stops walking and faces me. “What about your dad?”
The words won’t come. Maybe they don’t exist. I strain to feel it. To let it cut me so I can cry. So I can share grief with the one person who will understand the depth of what I’ve lost.
“Please don’t.” His voice is quiet. Pained. His fingers curl around mine and force them open, and I realize I’ve clenched my fist so tight, my broken nails have gouged four crescents of crimson into my palm. My blood mixes with Melkin’s, and I can’t look away.
“He’s dead, isn’t he? Jared’s dead.”
I look at him.
“I’m so sorry.” He drags me against him, and I lean into his shoulder.
“Why aren’t you crying?” He pulls back and cups my face in his hands. Pain is carved into his face.
“I can’t.”
“Why not?” He’s rubbing my cheeks with his thumbs as if he can transfer his living, breathing grief into my skin, shattering the icy silence within me into something he can understand.
I can’t allow that. If I grieve now, how will I ever find my way out again in time to keep my promises?
“Because there will be nothing left of me if I do.” I look at my hands, bleeding and bloodstained, the dirt from my father’s grave mixing with the dirt from Melkin’s in the creases. “And because I don’t deserve it. I deserve to bleed.”
I hold my hands up to him.
“I earned this. I did this. I deserve to be marked.”
“No.” He takes my hands in his. “You don’t.”
It’s useless to argue. I know what I’ve become inside. If he can’t see it now, it won’t take long before he does.
I don’t protest as he takes off my cloak and insists I strip down to my undertunic. He pulls off all but his pants, and I wince at the ugly purple and black bruises spreading like decaying blossoms across his chest. Then he lifts the leather pouch containing the dirt from my father’s grave over my head, sets it aside, and leads me into the lake.
I don’t want to let him wash my hands, but he pulls them beneath the water and carefully scrubs away the blood, the dirt, and the evidence of all that’s been.
The crimson has seeped beneath my skin, entered my veins, and become a part of what’s left of me. No amount of scrubbing can erase that.
“Yesterday, when the Cursed One came out of the ground, I said I loved you.”
“I’m not ready to talk about it.”
“Oh.”
He sounds hurt. I don’t want to hurt him. I just don’t know how to obliterate the silence consuming me and find anything that feels like hope.
He clears his throat. “I didn’t mean to … I guess I thought—”
“It’s fine.” From the corner of my eye, I see Quinn dive off a rock, slicing through the water with the barest hint of a splash.
“No, it’s not fine.”
I squint against the tiny pricks of light dancing over the surface of the water.
He sounds wounded. “I thought you’d at least be a little bit receptive.”
I can’t look at him. “I would’ve been. I was. Before.”
“Before? Before what?”
I whip my head back to face him. “Before everything! Before I saw Oliver get murdered right in front of me. Before I knew Dad was … gone. Before Melkin. Before I became this.” I gesture toward myself, wondering how he can think washing the blood off my hands makes it any less real.
He steps closer, his eyes glowing with fierce conviction. “You’re still the same beautiful, stubborn, strong, fascinating Rachel you were before any of that happened.”
My laugh sounds more like a sob, and I clamp my lips shut.
“Listen to me. I know it’s bad for you. I see that. But shutting yourself off from something good because of all the bad is unfair. To both of us.” His cheeks darken, and his eyes slide away from mine. “Unless you don’t feel the same, and this is your way of trying to let me down easy, and I’ve just made a spectacular fool of myself.”
He lets go of my hands, cramming damp fingers through his dark blond hair, and doesn’t look at me. “I’ve just made a fool of myself, haven’t I?”
“No.”
“Yes, I have.” He steps back. “What is it about you that makes rational behavior so difficult for me? Never mind. Forget I asked that. You’re right. It’s fine.”
Hurt and embarrassment are written all over his face, and I realize the only one being a fool is me. He’s offering me the one thing of beauty I can still claim as my own. I have to cling to it if I ever want to find my way back to the girl I used to be. And it isn’t fair of me to deny him the truth just because I worry it means less coming from someone as broken as me.
“No, it isn’t. It isn’t fine at all,” I say.
“We can stop this conversation right now.”
“I don’t want to.”
His laugh is weary. “That makes one of us. At least now I know how you felt two years ago.”
“I can do it again.” The words are out before I give myself time to lose my nerve. I don’t know how to do this. Love is a piercing ache that refuses to slide into the silence. I’m grateful to hold on to something real, but I don’t know how to make him see it.
He stops backing away and looks at me. “Do what again?”
I mean to say something heartfelt and sincere like “give you my heart.” Something that will erase his fears and leave us with one perfect moment in the midst of everything.
Instead, I step toward him, catch my foot against a rock on the lake bottom, and trip. Crashing into his chest, I plunge us both beneath the surface.
The water is crisp on top and murky below, where our feet kick up eddies of sand and rock. He catches me, his hands wrapped around my arms, as we plummet toward the bottom. My hair floats out to surround him, and he stares at me while above us the sun pierces the surface with golden darts.
Maybe this is better than words. Maybe this is all I need to show him he didn’t offer his heart to me in vain.
He lets go, and I reach for him. Twining my fingers through his, I feel something soft warm the silence within me a little as he tangles his legs with mine until I can’t tell where one of us ends and the other begins.
But it isn’t enough. The ache within me pushes against my chest, tingles down my arms, and hurts the tips of my fingers. I need more. I need to disappear into what we are together.
I need him.
I pull him against me as we start floating back toward the surface, and he smiles.
We break the surface together, and the air feels alive in a way it didn’t before. He smoothes my hair out of my eyes, and I impatiently shove his hands out of my way so I can reach him.
“Kiss me,” I say, and I don’t even have time to blush at the audacity of my words before he slides a hand into the hair at the nape of my neck and tugs me toward him.
Our noses bump, and his laugh sounds breathless. “Sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. Hurry up and kiss me.”
He tightens his arms around me and touches his lips to mine. His kiss is rough, tastes like lake water … and is the best thing I’ve ever felt. I press against him, consuming him like I’ll never get enough, and when we break apart, my pulse pounds against my ear, and his chest rises and falls like he’s been running.
“Done yet?” Willow calls from somewhere behind me. I hear Quinn shush her, but I don’t care.
Because Logan is looking at me like I’m precious to him. And the silence inside me cracks open, just a little. Just enough to let a small piece of hope float to the surface. I grab on to it with desperate fingers.
He keeps one hand on the small of my back and uses the other to trace the Celtic knot on the necklace he gave me the day of the Claiming ceremony.
“I promised to always find you, remember?”
“I remember.”
“I promised I would always protect you. You’ve been wounded badly because I failed to keep that promise.”
I shake my head, and the tears spill over, scalding my cheeks with heat.
“But I won’t fail you in this, Rachel. No matter what has happened. No matter what you’ve done. No matter what you will do. I will always love you. I swear it.”
His hand clenches around the pendant, and he leans down to capture my gaze with his. “I will always love you.”
His arms flex, pulling me against his chest, and his lips hover just above mine, our breath mingling in the dazzling morning air.
“I love you,” he whispers and then he kisses me again, his lips rough against mine, his breathing ragged as he devours my fear and makes me long to feel this way forever.