I leaned slightly into his space, just enough to make him register I wasn’t shrinking. “I’m not yours to work on.”
He laughed, soft. “I missed you, Lark.”
We walked deeper.
The trees crowded tighter. The air turned colder. Somewhere ahead, I heard metal on metal, a faint clang that didn’t belong to the woods. A gate, maybe. A door. A lock. Something manmade waiting inside all that dark.
My gut spoke up again, quiet but certain.
Someone was coming. Because Briar didn’t run to be free. She ran to bring hell back with her. And the men who loved her,and one who still possibly loves me, a family, didn’t do helpless. They did action. They did violence when it was earned.
I drew a slow breath through my nose and kept my steps even. Survival wasn’t loud, it was patient. Calculated. Stubborn. And I was very good at it.
Someone was coming, and if they didn’t get here in time, I would find a way to survive and escape. I just had to stay alive long enough to make that choice.
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
ZACH THOUGHT HE’Dbeen rewarded. That was alwaysthe mistake, men like him, small men, confusing proximity with possession, mistaking borrowed space for earned trust, and believing that standing beside something powerful made them part of it. He thought walking next to her meant he’d finally been recognized that his patience had meant something, that at this moment—this return—was his proof. He saw himself as chosen.
He wasn’t.
He was useful. That was all. A voice she once listened to. A familiar hand at the right door. A function performed atthe correct moment. He had always been a bridge, never the destination. And when a bridge outlives its purpose, it’s either torn down or forgotten.
She, on the other hand, was never built to be crossed.
That truth pressed against me again as we moved through the trees, a familiar weight I hadn’t realized I missed until it was back, tight in my chest, threading through bone and breath like wire pulled taut. Even bound, even dragged toward the place that tried and failed to erase her, she carried herself like someone still in control of the fall. There was no collapse in her posture. No yielding in the way she moved. Just the quiet, relentless presence of someone who refused to be made small.
She never bowed. Not the first time. Not now.
Others broke in all the predictable ways. Some screamed until their throats gave out. Some begged. Some tried to swallow the pain and wore their silence like armor, thinking endurance was the same as strength. They bent because they thought it would earn them mercy or at least make the hurt stop faster. They waited to be reshaped into something that would be allowed to survive.
But she never waited.
She looked you in the eye while you carved into her, and you knew, even then, that she wasn’t looking at what you were doing, she was looking atyou. Measuring the shape of your authority. Testing the hollowness of it. She never mistook pain for punishment or silence for surrender. Her defiance wasn’t a flaw.
It was design.
And fire, true fire, isn’t snuffed out by pressure. It doesn’t vanish when you cage it. It becomes something else. It grows hotter, more deliberate. It learns the shape of the walls around it and waits for the moment they crack.
That was my mistake with her, the first time.
I went too quickly. Took too much. I saw resistance and thought it was rebellion, and I treated it like something that needed to be crushed, when I should have recognized it for what it was, a kind of mirror, a reflection of something I should have studied before trying to command it. I used force when I should have used time. Demanded obedience before belief had a chance to root itself in her marrow. I tried to shape her through destruction, but you can’t hollow out a thing like her and expect it to echo back what you want to hear.
And still, she didn’t break.
That failure stayed with me longer than the scars I gave her. It lived beneath the skin like something waiting to be answered. Like an unfinished sentence I’d never learned how to end.
Zach’s grip on her arm tightened when she adjusted her stride, small, almost imperceptible, but enough to draw that flicker of panic in him. He thought she might run, because she moved like someone with plans. He feared her in that slow, quiet way men fear storms they don’t understand, storms that don’t announce themselves with thunder, but instead creep in with pressure you can feel in your teeth.
But I wasn’t afraid.
She wouldn’t run. Not here. Not yet. Because she knew better. Because she was already counting the trees, the paths, the angles. Already watching, listening, surviving in the way only someone who’s been taken apart before can survive. She was studying the shape of her return.
That’s why she was mine.
She told me she didn’t belong to me. Said it like truth. Not a threat. Not a plea. And that alone set her apart, because when most of them say that, they’re trying to convince themselves. But she said it as if ownership wasn’t something I could take, as if belonging was hers to grant and hers to revoke.
And still, I knew—when she finally gave it, it would be real. Irrevocable. Not obedience. Not submission.Recognition.
