“I kept waiting for him to prove me right,” Tess continued. “For him to tell you what to do, or decide where you could go, or get angry when you didn’t do what he wanted.” A ragged breath escaped her. “And then you came out here after me. And he let you.”
“He didn’t exactly like it,” she muttered.
A shaky sound came from Tess that might have been a laugh. “No. I’m sure he didn’t.” She was quiet for a moment. “But he let you choose anyway. I don’t think I understood before that someone could be that afraid for you and still let you choose.”
She said nothing, letting the words settle.
“I thought needing someone meant giving them power over you,” Tess whispered. “And giving someone power meant sooneror later they’d use it.” Her voice thickened. “Maybe I was wrong about that.”
Tess was right.
Sitting in an actual cage—a collapsed prison of metal and stone and darkness, the nightmare of everything that had ever been done to her—she finally understood the difference. It arrived whole and simple, the way the deepest true things always did, so obvious once you saw it that you couldn’t believe you’d ever been confused.
This was a cage. Walls that held her in against her will. A place she couldn’t leave. A dark that pressed down and gave her no door.
Njkall had never once been that.
He’d always given her a door, and every day for a year he’d left it open and waited to see if she chose to stay.
“It’s okay,” she said, and her voice came out steady and warm and completely without doubt. She reached over and took Tess’s cold hand in both of hers and held it. “You weren’t wrong to be afraid of it. You just had the wrong door. A cage is a place you can’t leave, Tess.”
She looked up, towards the sound of his voice, towards the male who had spent a year holding a door open for a woman too frightened to walk through it, and who was, right now, keeping himself from rushing to her for exactly the same reason he’d kept himself from everything else—because he loved her too much to risk her. “I can leave any time I want. I’ve just never wanted to. That’s not a cage. That’s a home.”
Above them, the distant rumble of Njkall’s voice stopped. For several long heart-stopping minutes, the dark went silent, but she held Tess’s hand and she believed.
Then from somewhere off to their left came the grind of stone shifting, the scrape of something huge and careful moving through a space too small for it, and finally, growing louder, coming closer, a voice she’d have crawled through the whole world to reach, saying her name.
“Polly.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
The last three feet of stone nearly broke Njkall. He’d spent the whole crawl down that corridor holding himself to a discipline that cost more than any wound he’d ever taken. Every instinct in his massive frame screamed to tear, to smash, to hurry, and he had killed each impulse the moment it was born, because a rushed male brought the ceiling down on the very thing he came to save. So he had breathed. He had tested each handhold. He had made his warriors wait behind him so they couldn’t add their weight to unstable ground.Patience,he’d told himself, over and over,patience is the only thing that saves her now.
Then he came around the final broken slab and saw her, and patience nearly abandoned him entirely.
“Polly.”
She sat in the corner where two solid walls met—she’d found the solid walls, some part of his mind noted, dazed with relief, she’d read the stone and found the safe place—and she had her arms around Tess, sheltering her, one small pale hand still gripping Tess’s like she’d sooner let the mountain fall than let go.
Her head came up at the sound of his voice. In the thin grey light leaking from above, her face was streaked with grime and her eyes were huge and glassy with the aftershock of terror, and she was, unmistakably, exhausted past the edge of what any small body should survive.
And she smiled at him.
“You came,” she said. Her voice shook, but it held. “I knew you would. I told her you would.”
He crossed the ruined chamber in three strides, testing nothing now, caring nothing for the dust that sifted down, and dropped to his knees in front of her, and gathered her into his chest, and could not for a moment do anything else at all.
He was shaking. He felt it the way you feel a thing happening to someone else. His whole enormous body was trembling like a sapling in a gale, and he could not stop it. He had his arms around her. He had his hands on her. Her scent, buried under stone-dust and fear but undeniably hers, filled his lungs, and still some animal part of him refused to believe it, kept expecting to open his eyes to a body gone cold. He buried his face in her hair and held her and shook and could not speak.
“Njkall.” Her small hand came up against his cheek. “Njkall, I’m all right. I’m here. Feel me—I’m right here. I’m not hurt.”
“I heard the ground go.” The words tore out of him, low and wrecked, his usual measured calm completely gone. “I heard it, and I could not—” His arms tightened. “I could not reach you. I stood up there and I could not reach you.”
“But you came. You didn’t come the fast way.” She drew back just far enough to look up into his face, and there was something in her steady grey gaze that stopped his breath—understanding,complete and unafraid. “You came the safe way. Even though it took longer. Even though it must have been—” Her voice caught. “You waited, and it was killing you, and you did it anyway. Because rushing would have brought it down on me.”
“Yes.” He could barely get it out.
“That’s why I knew we’d be okay.” She pressed her hand against his face, and her thumb moved across his cheekbone in a slow, soothing stroke, and he understood with a lurch of his heart that she was steadying him. “Because you’d rather ache for an hour than risk me for a second.” A shaky little laugh. “Stop shaking, you great furred mountain. I’ve got you.”
