But I knew better: no matter how hard I tried to lose myself to anger, to hatred, to memory, the needle always dropped back in the same groove. His name, my name, our names twinned like wounds.
The fire was dying. The world around us was black and bottomless, the trees a silent jury of skeletons.
I caught myself staring at him, the way his handshovered over the fire, the raw pink of his knuckles, the scars tracing the backs of his fingers.
He was always marked by violence, even when he wasn’t using it.
He noticed me looking, of course. He always noticed. He smirked, lips twisting upward in a way that made me want to claw them off his face.
“You going to keep staring, or are you going to say something?” he asked, low and almost curious. I could see the spark in his eyes: the challenge, the hunger for a fight.
“I was just wondering if you’d consider throwing yourself into the fire,” I said, voice flat. “I hear it’s a quick way to get warm.”
He scowled. “Ladies first.”
A branch snapped somewhere in the woods. I flinched. Caiden didn’t, but I could see his muscles tense, every line in his body preparing for disaster.
For a second, I wondered if there was anything he couldn’t turn into a contest of endurance, a test to see who would break first.
We sat in silence. The fire gnawed slowly at the wood.
At some point, darkness claimed the both of us.
Caiden didn’t bother to wake me when their light came back.
I awoke and he was already breaking down the pathetic camp, his back hunched and his hands moving like the hands of a clock wound too tight.
I watched him from the ground, hating him, wanting him to keel over dead just to prove I could survive without him.
But I knew I couldn’t, not really, not with every muscle in my body melted to a useless slush.
Sometimes I watched the shadows between the trees just to see if my mind would paint in a monster, a bear or a wolf or even Lillian, arms outstretched and mouth leaking black water.
But there was only ever Caiden.
He was the only thing truly alive out here, and he was proof that even after all the entropy and rot, there was something left to hate.
The path—all paths, really—ended in mud and darkness.
Sometimes I let myself hope that he would slip, that his foot would misjudge the mulch-masked mud and his body would tumble into the undertow of roots and fallen logs and vanish, leaving me to the cold and the silence and the long, patient hunger.
But he never did. Caiden moved through the world with a kind of primal glide, all instinct and muscle, and even when he faltered I knew he would never not get back up. I hated that about him the most.
By the third night, I’d started to lose my grip on the difference between waking and dreaming. The world blurred at the edges; tree trunks swayed and bled into each other, the sky was a gray bruise, the wind a howl that never stopped.
I started talking to myself just ground myself to reality.
At dusk, we found a dead deer. Half-rotted, ribs ripped open, fur sloughing off like wet moss. I caught the sweet, metallic rot on the wind before I saw it, and gagged, but Caiden only paused, staring with a cold calculation.
He crouched and inspected the corpse as if it might hold a secret, fingers hovering over the snapped spine, then looked at me, his gaze unreadable.
He said, “Something bigger than us did this,” and I knew it wasn’t a threat but a fact, a warning from one animal to another.
I wanted to blame him for it anyway.
Istared at the carcass, the thicket of yellowed bone clawing at the night air, and thought of Lillian sprawled lifeless on her bedsheets, her body already leached of color.
I could feel the accusation in his words: we were not the apex predators here. We were nothing. We were meat.
