Page 37 of The Final Cut

The handle fits my palm with the relief of something honest. Weight. Balance. Impact. A task with a beginning and an end. A body can understand this. Lift. Swing. Split. Repeat until the noise in the head gives up.

I carry the axe to the chopping block behind the cabin and set the first log upright.

The cabin glows ahead, every window a rectangle of warm light against the still-pale light of the early-morning marsh. Reva is inside by now with a hospital sweatshirt on her skin and Cal’s blood still in places soap will not reach quickly enough. Nash will be making calls and forming strategy. Shiloh is cleaning porcelain from the dirt because he’ll know well enough to avoid everyone right now.

I lift the axe.

Bring it down.

Wood cracks open.

The sound goes through my chest. Good. I want to break things. I want clean splits, sharp edges, damage I can stack and carry and put to use.

Another log. Another swing.

The muscles in my shoulders burn before my head starts to clear. Sweat gathers around my hairline, slides down my spine. I keep going. The axe rises and falls, steady enough to become a count.

The feed from the gala tries to come back. Reva on the terrace. The guard looming over her. The angle of the gun. The never-ending delay between seeing danger and reaching her.

I swing harder.

The log splits crooked, one half bouncing off the block and rolling into the grass.

I set another in place.

The axe comes down.

I saw her shoot a man tonight. I saw the first shot go wide, the second hit, the third finish what the second started. Her hands shook, and she still survived. That should settle something in me. It should help.

It doesn’t.

Because Reva surviving one moment does not make the next one safe. It means she has learned the cost of breathing in our world, and my first instinct is still to pull that cost out of her hands and take it into myself.

She would hate that. She should hate it. She’s not weak. She’s fucking strong enough for all of this, for anything. I know this.

I swing again.

Ten minutes pass. Maybe fifteen. Enough that my breathing changes. Enough that my anger is no longer clawing at the inside of my ribs. It has turned into something heavier. More useful. I line up split wood beside the block in a neat pile and reach for another log.

Movement catches my attention from the bedroom window, and I look up to see Reva standing behind the glass.

She is framed by warm light, one hand near her hair, the other resting at her side. The distance between us should make the details soft. It doesn’t, though. I see every bit of her. The line of her throat. The set of her mouth. The way she looks at me as if anger and apology and want have gotten tangled together and she’s decided words might not be the first thing she wants from me.

My hand tightens around the axe.

She lifts both arms and gathers her hair back.

The movement raises the sweatshirt, exposing a strip of bare skin. My body reacts hard and fast, stupid-simple in the middle of everything that is far from simple. She twists the hair up with one of those rubber bands Shiloh found for her, and something in my chest pulls tight.

Then she takes off the sweatshirt, slow enough for me to know she wants me watching. My mouth goes dry.

The gray fabric slides over her ribs, her breasts, the torn lace beneath. She lets it fall. Her gaze never leaves mine. The borrowed sweatpants follow, pushed down over her hips until she steps free of them. She stands there in lace and bruises and the kind of defiance that ruins men.

This is not a performance.

She’s not teasing because she wants to be chased. She is showing me the only truth either of us can reach without bloodshed. She’s alive. She is angry. She wants me. She chooses that in a room full of choices already taken from her.

I set the axe down. Carefully, because I still know what my hands are for.