"You're using it." Her voice cracks. "The silence. The wall. You're using the thing they taught you in the pit to push me away."
The accuracy of it hits me behind the ribs.
"This isn't protection, Garrett. This is cruelty."
She waits. I give her nothing. The man who carved her a hummingbird stands in his own cabin wearing the face of Number Seven, and the woman he loves is begging him to stop and he can't stop because stopping means she stays and staying means she gets hurt.
She picks up the dish towel from the floor. Folds it once and sets it on the counter. Walks to the hook by the door and pulls on her coat.
I don't move.
She comes back through the living room with her coat on. At the kitchen counter she stops, pulls the carved hummingbird from her pocket, and leaves it next to the coffee maker. She doesn't look at me.
The front door opens. Her boots cross the porch. Her phone is at her ear, her voice rough, controlled. "Jess. Can I stay at the clubhouse tonight?"
Her car turns over. The headlights sweep across the kitchen window and the beams drag shadows across the counter where the carved bird sits.
Taillights shrink down the forest road and disappear around the bend.
I stand in the doorway until the engine fades to nothing. Then I walk out onto the porch and lower myself to the top step. The cold bites through my shirt, through the fur on my arms, through the numbness I built to drive her away. The clearing stretches empty and white and the forest holds a silence I spent fifteen years surviving.
I don't go inside. Inside smells like her—shampoo, the spice paste she rubbed into chicken thighs yesterday, the pine boughs she hung over the doorframes because she wanted the cabin to feel like Christmas. Going inside means sitting in the middle of everything she left behind, and I'm not ready for that.
I stay until my fingers stop feeling the step under them.
I hear boots on gravel. A bike, killed at the tree line. Knox walks out of the dark with his cut zipped and his breath fogging in front of him.
He stands at the bottom of the steps and looks up at me.
"You're a fucking idiot."
I don't respond.
He climbs the steps and lowers himself beside me. The wood groans under both of us. He doesn't say anything for a while.
"I kept my distance from Sarah at the start," he says. "Told myself she'd be better off without an orc complicating her life." He pauses. "Her ex showed up while we were out at a fire. She fought him off until I got there. Could have gone the other way." His voice is steady but the steadiness has an edge. "She didn't need me to stay away, brother. She needed me close."
He stands. Grips my shoulder hard enough that I feel it through the numbness.
"Get inside before you freeze to death."
He walks back to his bike. The headlight sweeps the yard, and he's gone.
Another minute. Maybe five. Then I go inside because my body forces me to, my fingers locked into fists I can't open.
The fire has burned out. The room is dark. The guest room stands open. The pine boughs hang where she strung them and the smell of them mixes with the smell of her and the combination carves a hollow space behind my ribs that the winter rushes into.
The hummingbird rests on the kitchen counter.
She didn't take it.
The purr starts without permission. Low, aching, the sound of an engine with no one left to run for. It fills the empty rooms, vibrates through the counter under my palm, rolls out into the dark.
I close my hand around the bird and hold it against my chest and I don't know if I've just saved the woman I love or destroyed the only future worth having.
An engine on the forest road. Distant, moving slow. I lift my head. The sound grows, headlights sweeping through the trees beyond the clearing, the beams catching the falling snow in long white streaks. The car doesn't stop. It rolls past the turnoff to my cabin at a crawl, the brake lights flare once at the curve before the road bends north.
They're still watching.
