“You’re doing great, and you’re not crying,” Sam said. “That’s more than most people could say.”
The stretcher appeared then, gliding from the Grove Core’s veil like a specter. Two municipal healers carried it, a charm-woven privacy shroud whispering around the frame. Even beneath the sheet, Marlow Truckenham’s silhouette looked perfectly polished, right down to the angle of his shoes.
Goldie shuddered. Her fingers clenched the blanket around her shoulders, then slackened. Her breath came shallow, stuck in her throat.
One of the EMTs approached with an apologetic look, glancing between her and Sam. “I’m so sorry,” she said gently. “You’ll need to move. We have to… we need to place him here.”
Every witty defense she’d packed for moments like this scattered, vanishing like startled birds into the dusk. Her breath hitched in a strangled sound, her hands flying to her face as the sob fractured free and shattered her carefully built composure like a pane of fragile, sugar-thin glass.
Her thoughts weren’t coherent; just a chaotic litany of wrongness. Marlow’s lifeless outline. The sick, coiling heat that had pulsed through her moments before. The soil itself humming against the soles of her shoes. All of it crashed together, a cocktail of grief, shame, and some terrifying, exhilarating power that was not her own.
She was coming apart at the seams, the glitter and gloss of her persona flaking away to reveal the raw, terrified woman beneath. Untethered. Spinning out into silence that felt like it could swallow her whole.
And then, suddenly, she felt a pair of arms go around her. Tentative at first, cool and awkward, like vines hesitantly curling around a fence post.
She became painfully aware of the Thornfather’s Assistant beside her, drawing her against him with a hesitant grace. It should not have helped. It had no right to. But his scent—loam and green and petrichor—flooded her senses, and the solid, living coolness of his body was an anchor in the storm.
A wracking sob broke loose, boneless and raw, and she sagged against him. “I just—” she gasped, words fracturing with her breath. “I just want to go home.”
The Assistant’s hand stilled on her back, then pressed between her shoulder blades with a steady, grounding pressure. “Then I will take you.”
Before she could protest, he moved, rising with an unnerving, liquid grace and lifting her from the ambulance bumper. Goldie’s arms curled instinctively around his neck and she buried her face in the cool collar of his coat.
“Wait, hold on—” Sam sputtered. “You can’t just leave?—”
“We can,” the Assistant said. The words weren’t loud, but the air vibrated around them like a struck tuning fork, deep and undeniable. “We have given our account.”
“It’s all right, Officer.” The voice was clipped, calm, and cut clean through the rising noise.
Goldie blinked up through wet lashes as an Asian woman stepped forward—the one the Assistant had been speaking to. She wore a severe topknot, a dark suit that didn’t try to flatter, and a presence like a whetted blade. She wasn’t tall, but she didn’t need to be. Her nametag read: DETECTIVE OSEKI.
“Ms. Flynn. Assistant. We have your information. If we need more, we’ll call. You’re free to go.”
The Assistant inclined his head once. Then, without another word, he carried Goldie past the perimeter. Behind them,murmurs rose like stirred ash, and the trees of the Green Holdings bent its branches in a hush that felt—for one breathless, awful moment—reverent.
Chapter
Fourteen
The Assistant did not feel fatigue. He could walk until the moon dimmed and the earth’s roots grew brittle. Carrying Goldie was effortless, his stride as steady as the earth’s slow turning. But deep in his chest stirred a sharp, persistent ache.
Goldie didn’t speak on the walk back. Her tears came quietly, trailing warm lines down her cheeks. She didn’t wipe them away. Didn’t shake. She simply let them fall, each breath a thin, uneven hitch as if sorrow had to force its way past a locked door.
She trembled against him, and he did not know how to fix it.
He adjusted his hold, careful not to jostle her, and kept to the smoothest stones, stepping around the cobbled dips in Bellwether’s roads. The late spring wind was cool; she shivered faintly but made no complaint.
He did not ask her to stop crying. He did not speak until her voice cracked through the silence.
“You don’t have to keep carrying me.”
He looked down. Her eyes were glassy, her cheeks flushed, her voice thick. Her cheek rested against the curve of his collarbone.
“I know,” he said, and kept walking.
Somewhere past the alder-lined stretch of Seventh Street, her breathing softened, deepened. She hiccuped once, shuddered faintly, and then went still in his arms. Asleep.
The ache in his chest sharpened. He only knew her as loud, glittering, sharp-edged, filled with chaos and color. Now she was quiet. Dimmed. The sight pained him—an illogical, useless sensation he could not excise.
