by Jayla Kane
And then he turned around.
“Hey sugar,” he said softly. “I made you a plate. Have a seat--I’m going to jump in the shower.” Hunter put the pancakes down next to the careful arrangement of syrup, forks and knives, and walked right by me without so much as a second glance. He knew. He knew everything. I made my chin stop wobbling and stomped over to the pancakes, sitting down with a thump when I heard the shower turning on in the other room.
And then something new happened: I got angry.
Not at Hunter. Hunter probably meant to put a shirt on and just forgot, because this was his house and he didn’t sleep with one and even Hunter, the most thoughtful man in the entire world, would forget things sometimes. So I didn’t mind seeing him in all his glory—well. Half his glory.
I was mad because it happened. Because I had to go through that little nightmare cycle every goddamn time—because when he breathed near me just right or met my eyes a certain way or just fucking existed he reminded of sex, and sex reminded me of—
I chopped my pancakes up like a serial killer and devoured them.
This wasn’t going to win.
I wasn’t going to let this win.
I knew he was dead; Hunter told me. It was the first thing he said when Tristan left us alone. We only had a few minutes, because Tristan didn’t want Leo to know anything. And Hunter used those precious minutes to hold me and say thank you for saving my life and don’t worry, please don’t worry. He’s dead.
Don’t worry, sugar. Please don’t worry. He’s dead.
What Hunter didn’t say was how he died. What happened to the body, where he was, if he had a family, a name… I already knew why. I knew why the bastard did this to me.
Or at least I thought I did.
That was the hard part—I came back to it, over and over, when I least wanted to. I’d be in class and my mind would drift and I’d suddenly realize I was thinking about it again: what if I fought harder? What if I screamed louder? Why didn’t I leave when Hunter asked me to?
Why?
And in really bad moments, I got mad at myself. I got so mad sometimes…
I thought bad things about myself. Things so bad I couldn’t think them consciously—they slipped up on me, in the dark. Like he had.
Worthless. Deserved it. Weakling. Ruined. Trash.
When it first happened—the day after, when I was sitting in the room where I brought Hunter back to life and getting dressed for school and feeling how sore I should be… And I wasn’t, because of my stupid, useless power I bet… When I was thinking about that cheer routine I just couldn’t seem to get right and the fact that I missed practice last Friday and I was going to tank that grade I’d been worried about and if I hadn’t been such an idiot about Hunter I would’ve woken up when he was taking me and if I hadn’t been so fucking arrogant I wouldn’t have thought I could game the Rose and if I wasn’t so stupid, so weak and just garbage and—
I sat up in my chair, one shoe on, one shoe off, clapping my hand over my mouth as if I’d spoken the words out loud.
It was almost like… He’d poisoned me. He raped me, sure—that was one thing. But this… This was something else.
I know myself well. Other people have a hard time seeing themselves as they truly are, and I think that’s useful; our illusions keep us safe. Raven thought she remembered my birthday, and I would never correct her. Every year, Zelle would call her and tell her and Raven would pull out the present she bought me six months before and I would hug her until her breathing stopped. Raven wanted to be that kind of sister, because she thought that kind of sister was good and loyal. But Raven is good and loyal. She doesn’t need to remember my birthday. So I play along. And Zelle wants to imagine she’s some kind of rebel, with her sarcasm and her cussing and confrontations. But she’s the least rebellious of us all; it just helps her deal with the choice she’s made to basically give up her entire life to take care of us if she can cuss a lot and get a shitty tattoo once in a while. I’m fine with it. Charlie pretends she doesn’t care about not having a mom. She pretends not to care about pretty much everything. And I say go for it. Whatever gets you through.
But Hunter and I don’t do that. Another thing we have in common. I created appearances to support all of their ideas about who they were, to keep them safe, but I could only do that by understanding exactly who I really was, the whole time. A person within a person.
Hunter doesn’t pretend about anything, ever. No amount of silence can hide that from me; he is constantly assessing and reassessing and he keeps his goals simple and every single thing he will ever do is to support those simple goals. Protect who he loves. That’s it. That’s all. And I understand that too; that’s why we have these things in common.
That’s why I… I like him so much.
But this… This was so terrible feeling, this infection, the way my rapist convinced a part of me that I was broken. Permanently. And I’d put on my brave face at home and tried to wear it here, and it wasn’t working.
And that made me furious.
Getting raped sucked. I mean that in the literal sense—it hurt. It hurt really bad, physically. And mentally, psychologically. But the way that psychological pain lingered, grew and seeped into my ideas about who I was as a person… I had no way to fight against this.
And suddenly I wanted to.
Hunter clapped his hands in the bedroom after he got dressed, and I could imagine him, in my minds eye, pretending to rub his hands together to warm them up just so I would know where he was while my back was turned. I stared down at my plate and listened to him move into the room. When he pulled out a chair and sat down across from me, I glanced up at him; his face was placid as ever. “How do you know?” I heard myself ask him. I hadn’t intended to.
“Know what?” Hunter pulled the syrup over and poured it onto a tower of pancakes, unfolded his napkin and picked up his fork. When I didn’t speak again, his eyes locked onto mine and he waited, watching me, before he took a bite.
“How do you know what it’s like?” I swallowed and sat up, facing him. “I heard you when you got out of the bathroom. You weren’t cold. You just got out of hot water and there’s fireplaces in both rooms. You were letting me know where you were, and that you were coming into this room.” His eyes studied me. In this light—the clear, unblemished sunlight sparkling off of the white landscape outside, so bright it illuminated the violet in his eyes—he was almost unbearably handsome. “You haven’t asked me a single stupid question, you knew I needed to be sure he was dead. You don’t make me talk about it, but you know. You know what I’m thinking. How?”
Hunter put down his fork, his eyebrows lowering on his forehead as he thought over his answer. He leaned back in his chair and bit his lip, then rubbed his chin. “I don’t. Not in the sense you mean. I’ve never…” It was the first time I’d seen him struggle to say a word. “I’ve never been raped,” he rasped out, his voice suddenly three octaves lower, as if a cellar door were swinging open and he called out to me from inside, dark and haunted. His eyes were flat. “But I understand fear. I know what it’s like to be afraid.”
“Because of your dad?” I wanted to reach across the table and hold his hand, but I couldn’t. My fists were white knuckled in my lap, my jaw so tight that when I wasn’t speaking my teeth grated against one another.
“Yeah,” he said softly. “Because of him. And because of people, in general. I wasn’t always this big.”
“Tell me.” I needed this, I realized. I needed someone to talk to—someone that understood.
And there was nobody else.
“My dad hits people when he’s drunk.” Hunter said slowly. “And he’s worse with women. He raped Stacy at least twice—my step-mom,” he explained, watching my face with an intensity that matched my own. I had a feeling he had never spoken these words out loud before. “He just… He didn’t understand that making someone afraid of you all the time wasn’t the same thing as them saying yes.” Hunter spoke c
arefully, without inflection. “He beat the hell out of her every once in a while. So I remember… I tried to help.”
“Where is she now?” This must be Molly’s mother. I guess they didn’t have the same one.
“She’s dead.” Hunter swallowed and leaned back. “Cracked her head on the fridge during a fight.”
“Jesus, Hunter,” I said, unable to keep the tremor out of my voice. “How come I never heard about it?”
“Why would you?” He looked genuinely confused.
“Does nobody know this? It seems like the kind of thing that would’ve made it into the gossip—”
“Jake knows she’s dead,” he said quietly. “Nobody else. I was a kid. My dad was going after me—anyway,” Hunter said, stopping short. “She’s dead. Has been for over ten years now.”
“What aren’t you saying?” I stared at him. The word anyway hung in my mind. It wasn’t a Hunter thing to say.
He stared at me for a long time, expressionless. “It’s my fault she’s dead. She asked me to take her to the hospital, and I helped her to bed, and she bled out on the inside. Social workers came, cops; everybody knew about us, so they believed me when I told them she fell—or they didn’t, and it didn’t matter.”
“Hunter, how old were you? You couldn’t have—”
“I was old enough,” he said quietly. “I have to live with it. She’s not dead because she got a knock on the head. She’s dead because she curled up in a little ball and went to sleep forever. It’s done now. Nothing else to say about it.” I started to protest when he cut me off with a wave of his hand. “I think that’s the other part I understand, Baby,” he said, his voice harder now, his eyes locked on mine. “I understand guilt. I understand how you can feel responsible for something terrible—one tiny decision, and the shadow it casts is so damn long. I understand second-guessing yourself.” He waited until my chin stopped quivering to continue. “In your case, I hope it fades. I hope reason prevails.” Hunter cocked his head at me, revealing some of the animal inside of him. “Because your situation is different. It probably feels… Similar. You can tear yourself apart wondering why you did what you did, wondering if you’d done one thing different or said one thing—after a while, I hope you remember that you didn’t do anything wrong at all.” His nostrils flared. “And the one who did is dead.”
“How did he die?” We were in too deep to back out; I wanted to know. I wanted to know it all.
“I killed him.”
“How?”
“I used my claws.” I waited. “There wasn’t a lot left of his insides,” Hunter said, his voice dark. “Put his head on her desk.” Good, I thought, and then I felt a tear slipping down my cheek—what was wrong with me? What was wrong with me that I wanted that to happen to another human being, no matter what they’d done? I used my claws. I knew what that really meant. I remembered the blood on Hunter—he was covered in it. Buckets of it. And I wished… I wished, in that moment, that I’d been the one with claws. I’d been the one covered in my attacker’s blood.
“I know his name, now,” I whispered. “Jake knew who he was.”
“I heard,” Hunter said, indifferent.
“He’d done it before,” I said, my voice getting louder. “He raped a girl last year—at least one, Raven says, because if he did it twice then he probably—” I stopped short, Tanglewood’s face flashing in front of me. He was smiling. Lean, handsome. Cologne all over him, so much that he stank. Expensive grin, whitened teeth, contact lenses. A mole over his left eye.
“Then I only wish,” Hunter said quietly, “I’d met him before.”
“You wouldn’t have killed him before—”
“I fight,” Hunter told me, his voice soft and deadly. “You know I do. It’s how I deal with it—all of it. The guilt. The way it makes me hate myself sometimes. The hopelessness. I like to get hit, and I like to hit back.” He swallowed, and it struck me how hard this conversation must be for him, too. “If I met him, and Jake told me what he was—and he would’ve, because Jake understands me, and he knows—I would’ve beaten him until his eyes bled.” Hunter’s teeth ground against one another.
“Do you still… Do you still feel hopeless?” Would this ever go away? Any of it?
“Sure,” Hunter said, blinking down at his plate for a second. He picked up his fork, then set it down again. “But… Not all the time. I have things that give me hope. And besides, Baby, like I said—our situations are different.” He frowned at me, his eyebrows lowering on his face. “You get that, right? You couldn’t have—”
“I could’ve left when you asked me,” I whispered, hating myself for crying again. “I could’ve fought harder. Against you—against him—”
“If you fought me, I might’ve left you there,” Hunter said bluntly. “You wouldn’t have been able to keep me from taking you, not with Molly on the line. And then he would’ve done it even sooner, maybe more than once.” He took a shaky breath. “That’s what men like him do. And if you fought him harder… What if he just decided it’d be easier if you were dead?” He bit his lip, and I realized there was a tear tracking down his cheek. He inhaled sharply, sitting up very straight and wiping his cheek with his hand, smearing it away. “I… I will always regret… I have to live with taking you there, to that place, and then leaving you. I…”
For some reason, that bothered me. Which was stupid—why was I so ready to protect Hunter from more guilt—guilt he earned, in all honesty, by kidnapping me—when I couldn’t forgive myself?
He was right. Tristan’s words cut through my mind: he did himself a favor. Tanglewood wanted my power. He performed a blood rite in the tradition of our coven to make himself more powerful—no matter what the Rose wanted, that’s the kind of person he was, and that was his motivation. She just gave him an excuse.
So it was just luck that Hunter came back when he did, because for all we knew Tanglewood could’ve doubled his power by killing me too.
I needed to forgive myself, I realized. That’s what this was teaching me. All of those little decisions, stacked one on top of the other… All of those moments when I could have done a tiny thing differently… I couldn’t go back. And Hunter was right.
I wasn’t the one that did something wrong.
I was a girl who went to sleep, and woke up violated. That wasn’t on me.
If it was anyone else—Raven, Zelle, Charlie, Molly or mom, or any woman—I wouldn’t tolerate for one second the idea that she was somehow responsible for this.
I felt it lessen, then. Felt my epiphany shake off some of the shackles, gnaw through the chains, begin to free me a little bit.
I wasn’t ready for more than that; I wasn’t ready to deal with how this affected the way I felt about sex. About men, about love and going to sleep and wearing tight clothes and walking around at night. But at the moment, I felt… Better.
A little bit freer.
I reached across the table and slid my hand over Hunter’s; his eyes raked across my face, back and forth, as he tried to read my thoughts, then darted down to where my hand laid over his. He seemed too afraid to turn his over, to hold on to me. “Hunter,” I whispered, “I forgive you for taking me there. I already did, but I am forgiving you again, and I will again, and again, and again, if you need me to.” He didn’t smear the next tear away. We sat quietly, watching one another, for a very long time, and when I pulled my hand away and waved it towards his pancakes, he blinked. “They’re probably cold,” I said, “but they were really good. You were right. You can cook.”
He ate, then leaned back and peered into my eyes one more time before glancing over my shoulder, to the windows that lined the small cabin. “Miss… Do you think you might like to take a walk?”
I twisted and looked out at the thick pine trees, coated in diamond-studded layers of ice, blinding white. The world looked fresh. Clean and new. “Okay,” I said.
He stood up and held out his hand. I took it, and we went out there, into the winter, together.<
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Chapter Eight
Baby
We spent our entire Saturday like that: talking about things we never talked about, eating the delicious food he made, wandering around outside in the snow before taking steaming showers and settling in to talk and eat and watch some more movies. It was like a vacation. A real one—a space and time away from everything and everyone, with just my own thoughts and feelings to manage. Because Hunter didn’t require me to comfort him; I wasn’t sure if he believed me when I said I forgave him, or if it even mattered. He would never forgive himself, and we both knew it. But he handled that like he did everything else, with maddening stoicism and a very, very strong back.
Tristan’s cabin was so idyllic it was difficult to match with his hard, scarred face. It was entirely off-grid, the solar panels neatly arranged in sturdy rows side by side with raised garden beds now covered in dense snow and more spread out on his roof like a space station’s shining skin; the two chimneys puffed thin streams of smoke into the air, and elaborate fences demarcated the property around us from various corrals he’d partitioned off. Some were for horses, Hunter told me, that his neighbors used for trail riding in the summer; some were just to make sure Tristan had plenty of notice before anyone arrived at the cabin. Magic rumbled through invisible faultlines all over the property, wards he cast by himself with his terrible power to ensure no one could sneak up on us. Not that anyone would; as Hunter told me more about the wolves that ran things around here, it became pretty clear that the Guild had its limitations.
