Billy goes still, frighteningly still. His breath stops, his eyes darken.
“He said that?” he asks, calm in a way that isn’t calm at all.
I nod, wrapping my arms around myself as if I can hold my shaking ribs together.
“When? Why didn’t you tell me?” he demands, his hands tightening on the baby.
My hands come to his, fingers threading beneath his warm palms, prying them free, loosening his grip. He seems to realise, instantly smoothing his palms over my belly, as if apologising with touch.
“I was dragged from our room, drugged, taken.” Billy’s eyes are alight with rage. “That’s why I ran. I didn’t leaveyou, Billy. I left him.” Then, quieter, “I left so you could live.”
He moves in ever closer, both hands cupping my face. His touch is steady, but the tremor in his jaw betrays him.
“You think I’d choose life without you?” His thumb brushes the corner of my mouth like he’s memorising me again. “You think there is any world where I let you walk out of it alone?”
A tear slips free before I can stop it. “I couldn’t lose our child. And I couldn’t watch him destroy you.”
His forehead presses to mine, breaths colliding, the air thick and shaking. I feel him unravelling and pulling himself back together again in the span of a single heartbeat.
“We’ll face him,” he murmurs. “Together. And he will never lay a hand on you again.”
A part of me believes him, the part that always has, always will, even when it’s foolish. Even when it hurts.
But another part knows the truth.
Going back means stepping into the jaws of the monster that raised him. It means risking chains, cages, rituals, punishments.
I should refuse.
I should run again.
But I love him.
I love him so much, it is and always has been my downfall.
It’s not gentle or clean. It’s not the kind of love that saves you. It’s the kind that drags you under, holds you there, whispers that drowning together is better than breathing apart. He is carved into me, in bone, in blood, in every desperate beat of my heart.
I’m lovesick.
“I’ll go back with you,” I whisper, each word heavier than the last. “Not because I’m not afraid. I’m terrified, Billy.” My fingers curl into his coat, clinging like a sinner clutching a relic. “But Ican’t walk this world without you. I don’t know how. I don’t want to.”
His breath shudders against my cheek. “You’re mine,” I breathe, the words hushing out of me like a prayer I’ve been trying not to say. “And I’m yours. Even if it kills us both.”
His hands tighten on me, and when he kisses me again, it isn’t desperation this time.
It’s a vow.
One we might not survive.
But one we will follow into the dark anyway.
Chapter 36
BILLY
The road back to Raven Ridge Hallow looks nothing like the one I dragged myself down to find her. It’s the same path, same iron gates, same frosted fields, same moon wrung thin like a slit throat, but something in me has shifted. I’m carrying her now, Nellie’s hand inside mine, her breath brushing shallow and uneven, her fear a pulse I can feel even when she tries to hide it.
Every step toward the place that hurt her feels like sacrilege.
