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He stopped. The memory had made his throat catch.

I stopped with him. The sting returned to my eyes, but I refused to let any of it out. This story wasn’t about me, and I refused to let it be.

“The only thing I could do was run. Because I thought about the people they’d come after if I picked up the phone and called the police. Anyone I’d ever cared about. So I left her on the floor. I left those kids screaming. I ran.”

He looked at me, and it was like I’d never seen him as clearly as I did then.

“That’s what happened, Marlowe. I loved her. But I was too late. My mother took that and twisted it and she used it to poison what I have with you. Wren was in her own kitchen, her own house. They knew where she lived. She was never hiding. There was nothing to give up.”

I didn’t think I could hate her any more, but now I did. “The kids…what happened to them?”

“That’s the part I hate the most. They went into foster care, together at least. I have letters for them. I’ll send them when they’re old enough. Notes to tell them that Gus was named after his grandfather and Ava after the midwife who delivered her. That they were deeply loved and that she was doing everything she could to get away so she could keep them safe. They deserve to know.”

It took absolute stillness to stay composed. To drag what wanted to flow right back inside me.

I looked at him, at the lowered eyes, the rigid mouth, the shame sitting in every line of him. Exactly what I’d seen yesterday and thought was guilt. Now, my composure held together with a few stitches, I realized it was grief.

“They used you,” I said, my voice brittle. “And you also harmed her. Both of those things are true. But you chose to stop. You chose her life over yours. You were late, and it destroyed you. That’s not forgiveness. That belongs to the dead and who they left behind. But it is the truth. I understand that doing the right thing has been impossible. And I don’t resent you for it. It just breaks my heart.”

His hand closed over mine, his thumb brushing my knuckles. And I saw he couldn’t speak.

“I believed her,” I said.

His hand tightened around mine.

“For a whole day, I believed Octavia. I’m sorry, Damian. She found the exact thing that would sting the most and I fell for it. I almost ran. I had a bag half-packed in my head.”

“Marlowe—”

“But I’m still here. And I’m choosing you now, despite all of it.”

He stared at me.

“Your mother spent half an hour proving loving you was dangerous, and I came outside anyway.”

He was quiet for a long moment. “I kept telling myself that keeping my distance was protection, that if I never gave you all of me, they’d have nothing left to take.” His thumb stilled on my knuckles. “And then she walked you through the aviary and took it anyway.”

“I know,” I said. “I don’t want you to lie to yourself anymore.”

His palm spread across mine. My pulse beat hard beneath his fingers. Then we stood, and his gaze dropped to my mouth.

“Then I’m done pretending I can keep my hands off you.”

He kissed me, and it had the whole day inside it. The lie I’d believed, and the night without him, the relief of being wrong.

Then he was leading me to the bedroom, the walls and cabinets passing in a blur, my feet barely registering the ground.

He backed me into the bedroom wall with his body, one hand cradling my skull before it hit the surface, the other gripping my hip with the possessiveness I’d craved from the first day I’d known him. His tongue swept against mine. I tasted coffee and cinnamon, and I felt the soft groan he made against my mouth under my own skin, my hands fisted in his shirt.

I tugged at his shirt. He grabbed the hem and pulled it over his head, tossing it aside.

The lamplight caught all of him: the need and exhaustion and ink on lean muscle. The brand on his arm, the rowan pinned with nails, the bird on her blackthorn branch, the fox staring at me over its shoulder. All the proof of what had been done to him. All the proof of what he carried.

But there was one more, on his right side, mirroring the fox. A key entwined in birch.

I placed my palm against it. “When did you get this?”

He was quiet for long enough that I wondered if he would answer.