We breathe.
The fire pops. The guitar plays. Her fingers trace lazy circles through the fur on my chest while her heart beats against my ribs.
I reach for the mantel.
A small leather pouch she hasn't noticed. I filed it the night she left. Sat on the hearth with a rasp and took a piece of myself away because I didn't know what else to do with the loss. It's been behind the clock ever since, waiting for her to come back. Inside: a piece of horn. Dark, curved, smooth—filed from my right horn, the one she touched first, the one whose base she traces when she kisses me.
She knows the handlers grabbed them to control me. She knows the child's grip on the porch at the Toy Run stopped my heart. She knows that touching them is the most intimate act she's ever shared with another person.
I hold it out to her. My hand shakes.
"Minotaur horns don't regenerate." My voice is wrecked. "This is—"
I can't finish the sentence.
She takes the piece from my palm. Presses it against her chest, over her heart, and her eyes fill.
"Yours." She finishes for me. "You're giving me something you can't get back."
I nod. One sharp, terrified nod.
She sits up on the rug and leans into me and presses her lips to the filed spot on my right horn—the raw edge, the new gap, the place where something used to be and now belongs to her. The kiss sends a shudder through my entire body and the purr settles into something I've never felt before—I spent years suppressing it, not the rough stutter. This is the purr I choose. Given freely, the way the horn piece is given freely, a sound my body makes because it finally belongs to me and I know exactly where I want to spend it.
"You gave me the part of you they used to hurt you." Her voice breaks. "I'm going to wear it every day until you forget it ever meant anything but this."
She falls asleep on the rug with her body curled against mine, the horn piece clutched in her fist over her heart. I pull the quilt from the couch and drape it over both of us. The fire burns low. The record turns through its final track, the needle lifts and the cabin goes quiet except for my breathing and hers and the hum I let roll through me because it's mine now—not the pit's, not a betrayal, not a leak. Mine.
I'll set it into a pendant myself. Wrap it in silver, hang it on a chain fine enough that the horn sits against her collarbone where everyone can see it. Every monster who looks at her will know—she belongs to me, and I chose to belong to her, and the proof is the gap on my horn where something irreplaceable used to be.
The new year stretches ahead of me. For the first time in my life, the future doesn't look like something to survive.
It looks like something to build.
Epilogue
Nina - 6 Months Later
Four hummingbirds fight over the feeder this morning, and the smallest one keeps winning.
Garrett hung it from the porch eave in March, drove the hook into the beam with a single palm strike while I stood behind him describing Abuela's garden in Tucson. The cracked tile patio, the jasmine growing through the fence, the old glass feeder she refilled every Sunday with sugar water she boiled on the stove.
I mixed the sugar water last night. One cup sugar, four cups water, boiled and cooled, the same ratio Abuela used. The hummingbirds arrived in April. Two at first, then five, and now they rotate through in shifts, emerald-throated and copper-bellied, their wings blurring the air into a low thrum I can hear from the kitchen. The smallest one, a female with a white breast, guards the front port like she owns it. She dive-bombs the males when they try to drink. I've named her Valeria, after my aunt, it keeps me entertained every morning while I drink my coffee on the porch.
June in Nightfall Cove turns the clearing into a place I wouldn't have recognized six months ago. Garrett's garden stretchesalong the south side of the cabin, rows he tilled by hand in April and planted in May: tomatoes tied to wooden stakes, basil he pinches back every few days so the leaves stay fat, peppers hot enough that I made the mistake of rubbing my eye after slicing one and spent twenty minutes at the sink while he stood behind me with a wet cloth and a purr that shook with the effort of not laughing.
The cabin changed around us in small ways. A second chair on the porch, Adirondack, wide enough for his frame, and a smaller one beside it that he built from the same wood so they match. Hooks by the front door hold my jacket next to his cut. A bookshelf in the bedroom carries his Rumi and Neruda on the top shelf and my nursing textbooks and romance novels on the bottom two.
My fingers find the pendant at my collarbone. The horn—dark, curved, smooth—sits in a silver setting a jeweler in Portland crafted while Garrett stood in the corner of the shop and watched the man work with an expression that made the jeweler's fingers shake. The chain is fine, almost invisible, and the horn rests in the hollow of my throat where anyone can see it. The weight of it against my skin has become part of my body, the same way my heartbeat is part of my body—constant, present, mine.
The gap on Garrett's right horn has smoothed over the months. The edges rounded, the raw spot where he filed the piece away no longer rough under my fingers. But the gap remains. He catches me touching the pendant and the purr kicks in before he can stop it, rolling through the floorboards, vibrating the coffee in my mug, a sound that used to humiliate him and now leaks out of his chest a dozen times a day because he's stopped trying to hold it back.
The sign above the door readsNIGHTFALL AESTHETICS—ALL SPECIES WELCOME.
Construction started in April. A converted retail space on Main Street, wedged between Raven's Mystic Moon and the hardware store, small enough that I can stand in the center and touch both treatment room doors if I stretch. Two rooms. A consultation area with a chair Jess found at a secondhand shop in Coos Bay. A reception desk Garrett built from reclaimed wood, salvaged beams from a barn outside town, sanded and joined and sealed until the surface gleams, his hands moving over the grain with the same precision he uses on his carvings.
I'm booked through August.
My first client walked through the door on opening day, and it took me a full five seconds to process that Betty, the woman who'd fed half of Nightfall Cove from her diner counter, stood in my reception area with her reading glasses pushed up on her forehead and her purse clutched in both hands.
