Page 42 of The Final Cut

“That I would lock you behind every door in this place before I watched you run toward Isabel blind.”

Her body goes still.

I press my mouth to her shoulder.

“I don’t want to cage you,” I say. “But I won’t let you put yourself in harm’s way.”

For a long time, she says nothing.

Then her hand covers my arm where it rests across her waist.

“I don’t want to be rescued so hard I disappear.”

The words go through me clean.

I turn her in my arms until she faces me. Her eyes are tired, red at the edges, still burning under all that grief.

“You won’t disappear with me.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I’ll learn how to make sure.”

It is not a perfect answer. I don’t have those. Perfect answers belong to men who lie or men who haven’t been tested hard enough. I have only this body, these hands, this need to keep her alive, and the discipline to make that need a tool instead of a leash.

She studies me for a long moment.

Then she sighs. “I guess I’m gonna have to trust you.”

There is no bite in it this time. Only exhaustion. Acceptance, maybe, though not the soft kind. Reva does not accept things softly. She takes them into herself with suspicion and teeth.

I touch her cheek. “We start in the morning.”

“With what?”

“Getting out of my grip.”

Her brows lift.

I let one hand slide around the back of her thigh and pull her closer. “You’ll be terrible at it first.”

“That is a dangerous thing to say to a woman who knows where you keep the axe.”

My chest loosens for the first time since the terrace.

“Ha,” I say. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

She tucks her face against my throat, and I hold her while the cabin hums around us.

Cal is alive, Delia is gone, and Isabel is coming.

In the morning, we train. In the morning, we plan. In the morning, I start teaching the woman in my arms how to survive the hands that want to take her from me.

DELIA

AGE 16

Father had a laugh I remember better than his face. That feels a little like a betrayal.