Avery (Random Romance)

by Charlotte McConaghy

  —sand under my feet, warm, grainy and gentle against my bare skin. Your feet are next to mine, bigger and browner and you’re smiling at me with those very white teeth that all the girls in your class love you for, and you’re telling me I’m being paranoid, but I vow, quite simply, to kill anyone who touches you. You put your hands in my hair, like you always do – your hands were born to be amongst my blond locks, you have told me this a thousand times, a million, and every single time I have believed you—

  —It was cold. Shit, Gods, there was so much damn pain I felt my sanity slipping, and even as I struggled I didn’t know if I was getting anywhere, or where I was aiming for—

  —your skin is hot from being under the sun all afternoon. We have been here for hours, roasting and turning, roasting and turning. I want the sea but your arms are draped over me and I want them more—

  —There was no air. That’s what became clear. It was a slap, a jerk, a tug back to reality, to the painful world of this sea I’d thrown myself into. I kicked, because if I didn’t kick I would die: that I knew, it was all I knew. Kick and swim and stretch, and try not to cry because you’re underwater and if you cry you might open your mouth and then you’ll drown. Hadn’t I wanted to drown? Hadn’t I wanted to die? How many nights had I lain in bed wishing I could slip away, just drift off to sleep and never wake? How many times had I longed for death? And now here I was, kicking and swimming even though it hurt more than anything I’d ever known – kicking for life, when life was a nightmare I was too weak to face.

  Still. Up I went – up to the surface to gasp air into my weary lungs, to drift onto my back and let the angry sea take me where it willed. Because I had a talisman.

  I will love you for all the days of this world.

  Ambrose

  My life nearly changed in that one moment. I had no idea, no warning. I’d started walking to the steps – away from the Gods-forsaken prison cells, from the prison master and his guards and his wretched prisoners – and one more moment would have changed everything.

  I reached the first step and placed my foot on it, my mind already turned to the ship I had to catch – the ship I was sure she was on.

  But then—

  ‘Your Majesty,’ a voice rasped behind me, into the silence I had left in my wake.

  I paused and looked back to see who had spoken. I hadn’t expected it to be a prisoner, nor a Kayan one at that. He was old and small and frighteningly thin. I hesitated, not wanting to waste any more time in this place, knowing I had to hurry, but in the end I walked back towards him, through the guards, assuming he couldn’t raise his voice, sick as he was.

  He had grey eyes, but as he stared up at me, they shifted – to violet. Ava’s violet – the exact colour. I froze.

  ‘There was a girl,’ he whispered very softly, tears in his eyes.

  Before I could respond, the prison master lunged at him, grabbing him through the bars and shaking him. A grunt of furious disbelief left my mouth and I backhanded Corrin across the head so hard it sent him flying to the ground.

  ‘Open these bars!’ I snarled.

  A guard rushed to do my bidding and I entered quickly, sinking to the man’s side. He was wheezing badly, hurt further by Corrin’s rough hands.

  ‘It’s all right,’ I said urgently, holding him by the shoulders. He was skin and bones – a skeleton with barely any life left. ‘You did the right thing, and you will be very well looked after. Just tell me about the girl. Where is she now?’

  The poor man opened his eyes – they were still bright purple. Her purple. ‘She was hurt very badly. She couldn’t handle it anymore. She couldn’t take any more of the torture.’

  I felt sick to my guts, my bones and my muscles. ‘Where is she?’

  ‘She was beautiful before he started – very young and beautiful. She didn’t scream. I’ve never seen a girl who didn’t scream. I only spoke because of what you did for us in here. What you did to the master.’

  ‘Where is she?’

  ‘She jumped, Your Majesty. She jumped.’

  My vision went red. I stood and everything slowed right down – I could feel my heart beating slowly, my skin tingling slowly. I could see people staring at me, and the prison master getting up at warped speed – slow, slow, slow. The waves outside moved at a snail’s pace and I was the fastest object in the world as I moved towards him.

  A mighty, strangled roar erupted from my chest, exploding into the building with such violence it made every man flinch in horror. I saw their fear because suddenly I could see everything – I could see the way Corrin turned towards me and how he grew still with terror. I saw the guards fleeing out of my way, and the prisoners gaping at me. I saw it all, but what I now knew with abstract clarity, was how Thorne had lived the twenty-eight years of his life: with a beast inside him, a monster. The very same creature that was suddenly tearing into my body and threatening to consume me.

  I crossed the space and lifted the prison master, a man who was massive in his own rights. I tore his arm from its socket.

  He stared at the missing limb for a long moment, and then he shrieked. This was a man who’d been sent here because he was tough and brutal and cruel, and he was now shrieking and blubbering before me. I wanted to burn the world down, I was so disgusted by it.

  Dropping Corrin to the ground, I crouched low over his face. ‘How did you torture her?’ I snarled.

  He shook his head, sobbing.

  ‘HOW?’

  ‘With iron and fire,’ he wept. ‘With your sigil on her body.’

  I’d never known such— Holy Sword, I— I ripped away his other arm. I didn’t know what to do. I was adrift, my mind shifting perilously close to madness.

  ‘Your Majesty,’ a voice broke into my blood-soaked rage. I looked up, eyes barely able to focus. It was the old man in the cell next to us. ‘Her body. You should try to get to it before it’s gone.’

  A moan left my mouth as the reality hit me. Yes. That’s what I should be doing – her body, her body, her body. I stood and ran from the prison, past the bewildered guards and the stunned prisoners. I sprinted down the steps and out onto the grassy hillside by the cliff. It was so dark I could barely see a thing – so Gods-damned dark. I ran up and down the hill, over the rocks, searching and searching in the blackness, my eyes peeled desperately for anything in the water, anything that might possibly be her, but there was nothing. Nothing.

  I didn’t know what to do – I couldn’t think straight. Hadn’t she asked to be brought back to the sea? Hadn’t she wanted to end up here, in the water? But no – not yet. It was too soon. I had to see her once more before I let her go. Just once more.

  Into the water – that’s where I would go. Into the water to search properly. It was wild and deadly as I waded into the freezing surf and I was slammed against the bank a few times before I got enough power in my strokes to take me out into the depths. I couldn’t see a thing and I was almost instantly frozen numb, but I had to keep searching. What had I left but this final search? What had I left but this place for us to die?

  A sound cut through the crashing of the waves – the loud whinny of a horse. I looked up to see Migliori flying low over the water, panicked and screaming his dismay. I shouted at him to go back to land, worried he’d be hurt out here as it started to rain, but he kept making the awful, high-pitched screaming sound and flapping in circles. It took me a good few seconds to realise that he’d found her.

  Following his circling, I spotted her blond hair in the surrounding darkness.

  A great crack made its way through my heart. She was floating on her back when I made it to her and I pulled her into my arms and kissed her cold, cracked lips. Her body was in a very bad way – the bastard had ruined her. I couldn’t count the number of brands she’d been given – they seemed to cover almost every inch of her skin, and there was even one on her cheek. A wolf – my house sigil.

  Just as I had truly given up, truly sagged under the weight of grief, Ava m
ade a sound.

  It was a cough, followed by a very faint whimper. I yelped in shock, a breathless, aching joy slamming into my organs. Making sure of my hold on her, I swam like a maniac towards the shore. We were thrown about, and I tried to protect her from the worst of the waves, but by the time I dragged her onto the rocks she was barely there. Barely a person anymore. Blue and shivering from the cold, breathing very irregularly, and burnt so badly her body was barely recognisable.

  Migliori landed and pressed his nose to her neck, nuzzling gently and crying his despair. Now what? It came to me – where I had to take her. The only person I had ever met who knew how to deal with burns properly was my sister-in-law.

  Roselyn

  ‘Have you ever tried to count the stars?’ he asked me as we walked together, looking up into the night sky.

  ‘I tried once,’ I murmured. ‘But it’s impossible.’

  They seemed infinite as we stared. Not looking at where I was walking, I tripped and stumbled, but Thorne reached out and steadied me, glancing sideways. I was wreathed in fur to stave off the chill of the night air, and with my hood around my face, I knew it was hard for him to see me in the dark. Thorne’s head was bare, so I had no trouble watching how his discomfort grew the further we walked from the fortress. He was carrying all our belongings on his back, but he didn’t seem to have noticed the weight of it.

  ‘What did you do?’ I asked suddenly. ‘The mistake to make us leave?’

  He stared straight ahead as he answered me. ‘I told my mother she could kill you on the night of the solstice.’

  I stopped walking.

  He turned back, spreading his hands wide. We stared at each other for what could have been minutes or hours – I wasn’t able to tell. There was something impossible about the moment. I knew we could come out of it on either side – we could survive it, or we could be broken forever.

  ‘I’d just found out you were in love with my brother.’

  ‘I’m not. I never was.’

  He sighed tiredly. ‘Just admit it. You are a little bit.’

  I stared at him.

  ‘Can we walk while you think? We need to cover some ground before the sun rises.’

  I followed him, walking a few steps behind. ‘I don’t know if I do or not,’ I finally admitted.

  ‘Pick up the pace, Rose,’ he snapped. I hurried forward to walk beside him. There were twenty-three fireflies in the trees around us. A few moments later, we passed four more, and then another three. It occurred to me that I might be counting the same fireflies over and over, so I started counting my footsteps instead. I wish we could keep walking like this forever.

  Before I knew it, we had emerged onto the seashore and I caught my breath. Fear and wonder vied for room in my chest – I loved it here as much as I feared it.

  ‘Can we live next to the ocean?’ I asked him without thinking.

  He grunted in response, and I took it as a good sign.

  As we walked along the rocky beach, I counted the waves crashing against the shore. They sounded very loud in my ears and my pulse began to keep time with them. The oyster farms glinted in the moonlight, and I loved them with a strange intensity. A fixation, as Thorne would call it.

  He started leading me further out onto the rocks, and very soon it was slippery. Up ahead the ground met a large cliff that reached right up into the sky. The ocean crashed against the cliff and the rocks at the bottom disappeared underwater. We were walking straight towards that point. I swallowed my unease but stopped trying to keep pace with Thorne. I felt drops on my skin and looked up with trepidation to see that big dark clouds had started to roll in while we’d been walking.

  ‘Where are we going?’ I called, but he didn’t hear me over the sound of the waves.

  ‘Quickly now,’ Thorne returned to my side. I slipped on the rocks a few times, but he was holding onto me and didn’t let me fall. Soon the rain grew heavier, and it became harder to cover ground, but eventually we made it to the edge of the cliff.

  I stared at Thorne in the darkness, unable to fathom what we were doing. Was he leading me out here to die?

  ‘We have to swim now, Rose,’ he told me over the sound of the rain and the waves.

  ‘I can’t—’

  ‘I know you can’t swim, but you can hold onto me. I shall swim for us both. I shall get us there – I promise you that.’

  ‘Thorne,’ I tried again, my voice chipped, ‘I can’t do it – I can’t do it, I can’t do it, I can’t do it—’

  ‘You can, Rose. All you have to do is trust me.’

  He held out his hand and I took a deep breath. What a joke I was – a woman who wanted to live near the sea who had such an unnatural fear of water that she couldn’t even swim. I started counting as fast as I could, squeezing my eyes shut.

  ‘I can’t do it, I can’t do it, I can’t—’

  ‘Rose, look at me.’ His voice was so firm that I obeyed. He didn’t understand – he didn’t know that there was a monster inside me, freezing every piece of me, making it impossible to move. I couldn’t go any further into this water – I couldn’t.

  ‘I should never have made Vincent hurt you the way he did, but not because you aren’t strong enough to handle the fear. You are. You don’t have to be strong enough to face it on your own – no one does. You just have to be strong enough to believe that I will get us there, and strong enough to trust that I won’t let you go, not for a single second.’ He paused, moving close enough that I could taste his breath against my lips. The world emptied of every soul except the two of us. ‘Show me, my wife. Show me that strength.’

  With an aching chest, I nodded once, teeth chattering with uncontrollable terror. He was right – I trusted him completely, and I could hold onto that. Thorne strapped the pack to his chest, making room to swing me onto his back. ‘Hold on tight,’ he said and I gripped him with all the strength in my body, all the strength that I would show him I possessed.

  Thorne waded out into the rough water, ploughing through the crashing swell. The waves pummelled into him, threatening to sweep us back onto the jagged rocks, but he was so strong, so determined. When the water was up to his waist he struck out swimming, his strokes long and powerful. The waves swept over me, making it almost impossible to hold on, and I started to cry, my tears disappearing into the sea that surrounded me.

  Everything was black – I couldn’t see anything ahead of us except the dark, broiling waves and buckets of torrential rain, but Thorne kept going, he kept swimming. I wondered if this power came from the berserker blood in him, or if he was really just this determined to save us.

  Finally, after what seemed an age – after I’d counted well beyond a thousand, my heart stretched and twisted and wrung dry – we made it around the cliff, and the mouth of a huge cove opened up before us. I gave a sob of bone-deep relief. Thorne rode a wave right into the cove, up onto the flat rocks of the shore. In the darkness of the night and the storm, I could just make out the shape of a hut and the small boat moored nearby – the only safe way in and out of the cove.

  I knew it was stupid, because we were safe now, but I couldn’t stop crying. I crawled from Thorne’s back and tried to help him further onto the rocks, away from the freezing water. A sob left me as I untied the pack from his chest and dragged it up to the cabin. He lay on the empty shore; he lay so still I couldn’t bear it. Poking my head inside, I saw that the hut was empty and abandoned – there wasn’t even any furniture.

  ‘Thorne!’ I called. Every part of me was in the word, that one word, his name.

  A moment later I saw him stagger upright, breathing heavily, clearly exhausted. But he climbed to his feet and entered the wooden cabin alongside me. I should have known. I should have known no mere ocean could vanquish him.

  With the door shut, the sound was muted, but it was very dark. A flash of lightning lit up the room, in which Thorne looked like a maniacal monster, drenched to the bone and staring at me as I wept. I didn’t know what h
e was thinking, or if I had angered him, but in the darkness he reached out and put his hands on my face, gentler than I had ever known him to be.

  ‘It’s all right, sweetheart.’

  I still couldn’t stop crying, and I couldn’t count or wish to make the fear go away, because my mind was so full of crashing waves and drowning and disappearing into the darkness. He had lain there, slain. I had thought him gone, taken by water.

  ‘Roselyn,’ his deep voice struck inside me, bringing me to the room, making me present.

  ‘My father …’ I stuttered. ‘He hated me. Hated my counting. But I didn’t know how to stop, I could never stop …’

  ‘It’s all right. You don’t have to—’

  ‘I kept counting and counting and counting and he hated it – oh how he hated it.’

  ‘Rose—’

  ‘I couldn’t stop I couldn’t stop I couldn’t bear it and then he pushed me under, pushed me right under and held me there and I counted, I counted to make it pass, but he held me so long that my numbers ran out and the only thing left was the water the water the water—’ My words vanished; my breath vanished. The air had gone out of me and I felt as though any touch could shatter me.

  Thorne was staring at me and there was something brand-new in his eyes, something brilliant, as though perhaps he finally understood. ‘Roselyn,’ he said firmly, moving his lips right near mine. ‘How many tattoos do I have?’

  ‘Thirty-eight,’ I stuttered.

  ‘Count them again now.’ He stripped off his shirt and pulled me to the floor. He sat with me in his lap.

  ‘I can’t,’ I sobbed, closing my eyes, but he shook me gently.

  ‘You can,’ he told me. ‘Do it, now.’ Then he started pointing each one out and I counted along with him. The tattoos were beautiful, and I’d always loved to count them – to run my fingers across them, exploring each one and imagining the stories behind them.