The bar collapses. The whispers go silent.
20
Ash
I wakeup with her name still in my mouth.
Curved walls of root and earth. Bioluminescent moss pulsing soft blue-green provides a cushioned mattress under me. The hollow breathes around me like something alive and patient and completely indifferent to the fact that I feel like I’ve been turned inside out.
Finnian’s heat at my back feels like a warmth I don’t deserve, and I don’t turn into it.
I also don’t wipe the tears when they come. I let them trail, one at a time, onto my hand below, and I watch them like they belong to someone else. Like if I don’t claim them, they don’t count.
I knew Pepper wouldn’t forgive me. I never expected her to. But I expected anger. I expected the magic whip and the shattered glass and the cold grey eyes cutting me down to size.
I didn’t expect her back.
Turned. Done. The door already closed before I finished knocking.
Heartache. I turn the word over. That’s the one. I’ve been shot twice, broken three ribs, and had my entire identitydismantled by ancient Fae magic, and a woman turning her back on me in a dream is what finally finds the soft spot.
Worse? The magic of the trial weaves around me, pulsing in time with my pain. Tasting it and finding me unworthy.
My heart burns. My throat. My chest. All of it.
Its disappointment settles over me like a second skin.
Fucking Faerie.
Easier to be angry at a forest than at myself. I know that. I do it anyway. I’ve been doing it my whole life, pick the thing you can fight and fight it, because the thing you can’t fight is the one that kills you.
The thing I can’t fight is the memory of Pepper’s back. Still and rigid and finished with me.
So I’m angry at a forest.
I sit up too quickly, the need to move overwhelming the sense to do it slowly.
My muscles itch. My body aches, the specific kind, deep and gritty, bone-level, the kind that lives in someone who hasn’t truly slept in weeks and keeps asking her body to perform anyway. My eyes feel like they’ve been sandpapered from the inside.
I’m a mess.
I get up anyway.
Behind me, Finnian shifts in his sleep. A small sound, not distress, just the restless movement of someone whose body hasn’t learned safety yet.
I know that sound. I made it for years. Still do, if I’m honest, which I’m trying to be, with varying success.
I don’t look back. If I look back I’ll want to go to him. And if I go to him I’ll have to feel something other than this, and I’m not ready to put Pepper down yet. I owe her this much. To sit with what I did until it stops feeling unmanageable.
I stumble toward the hollow’s entrance, where groundwater seeps through the roots in a thin trickle. I cup my hands beneath it and splash the cold water onto my face. It wakes me further.
Out of sight, I settle on the edge of a gnarled root and watch the Dark Forest through the gap in the moss curtain. My throat feels tight and raw and my hands won’t quite stay still in my lap.
Long ago, I learned the art of silent crying. Military barracks teach you that fast, cry loud and someone files a report. Cry quiet and it’s just weather.
Graves would call it an asset.
I almost don’t hear Kestra until she settles beside me, her head coming to rest on my shoulder like it’s done it a hundred times before in the last month..
