My chest heaves. No one has ever said that to me before. Not like this. Not with truth behind it.
Nellie steps toward me, sliding her fingers into mine. Her hand fits there perfectly, warm, soft, alive.
My mother watches the gesture with aching pride. And I understand, with a violent, overwhelming rush, that I will forever protect the two women before me.
If I am anything good at all, if anything pure survived the blood that raised me, it is because of her, my mother.
And if I am anything worth loving, worth saving, worth forgiving, it is because of the woman now holding my hand, my Little Lamb.
The greenhouse creaks in the cold, the glass fogging with breath, the flowers bowing under the weight of night. And my two worlds stand together, finally, impossibly, and I realise I am whole in a way I have never been before.
And for the first time in my life, the darkness inside me settles, the monster curls in on itself, and I finally feel it, an overwhelming wash of cool heat, it feels calming, it feels good, it feels something like peace.
Epilogue
PENELOPE
It has been six months since the night everything ruptured, since the lashing, the blood, the screaming, the moment my body tore itself open to release the tiny heartbeat that saved me as much as I saved him.
Six months since the moment I thought I might die, and the moment I realised I didn’t want to.
Funny, isn’t it?
How life can drag you by the hair through hell and still leave you greedy for another breath.
Our son, August, sleeps in a small crib beside our bed, wrapped in soft blankets the women of the commune sewed by hand, a kindness I didn’t expect to find. I drag my knuckle up the soft rosy skin of his warm cheek, my fingertip pulling through a tiny tight coiled curl of dark brown hair. His ruby-tinted lips pouted, he whimpers in his dreams. Little fists clenching, his face scrunching in a way that mirrors Billy’s when he’s trying not to feel something. I cup his little face in the palm of my hand,smoothing over his brow with the pad of my thumb, erasing the line between his brows, the tension in his tiny body untangling.
My heart lodges itself somewhere between my throat and my ribs every time I look at him.
He is proof of survival, a quiet, warm reminder that something good can claw its way out of violence.
I shift against the mattress, running a hand over my abdomen. The scar is smoothing out, softening like the memory of pain rather than the thing itself. It aches sometimes when the rain comes, or when I remember too clearly the sound of someone shouting about blood and heartbeats and losing. I exhale slowly.
The past six months has been stitched together with equal parts horror and hope. A patchwork of tiny salvations. A bruised kind of peace, but peace, nonetheless.
The Obsidian hasn’t changed.
Not really, not that I expected it would.
Its bones are the same, rigid, ancient, calcified by fear and tradition, but somehow the marrow has shifted, and I can feel the difference the way you feel weather coming through scar tissue. Billy actually attends council now. So do his younger brothers. Three young men with matching passion and mismatched tempers, standing in the same circle that once only used them as puppets.
Sometimes I listen through the walls while they argue, hiding inside another passageway Dolly found. The old voices snarl about purity and punishment, while the younger ones speak of logic and the future.
It isn’t a revolution.
But it’s a crack.
A thin one.
A fracture running through stone.
And Billy, my feral, furious monster, my impossibly stubborn Pair is the wedge driving it deeper.
He doesn’t rage anymore the way he used to. Not outwardly. His fury has become quieter, and infinitely more dangerous, a cold, controlled thing living behind his ribs, set aside for when he needs it most.
Violence doesn’t scare the council or The Obsidian’s members, we always knew that, but Billy never could quite work out how to keep himself in check. Sometimes I wonder if I am the reason he has hidden that part of himself, if I am the reason it still burns in his core like an untamed hell beast.
Moonlight slips through the stained glass window like a blade as I sit up, pulling the blanket around my shoulders. The nights are cold here. Every season feels more like winter than the last.
