“You know,” I say, clearing my throat, my eyes focusing on hers. “I wasn’t sure if you were real.”
“Sometimes I wish that I wasn’t,” she whispers, and my brows knit together. I push off the wall, shove my hands into the pockets of my jeans and step closer to where she stands in the center of the room. I don’t get too close for fear that she’ll flee the moment I do.
“And yet,” I murmur, “here you are.” Her eyes meet mine, wary and fragile.
“I’ve seen what you do to them,” she says, as if acknowledging a secret she’s been forced to keep. She doesn’t move. She’s testing me with her distance. An invisible barrier that keeps her safe. But her eyes betray her indecision. Stay and dance in the dark with me, or run as far as she can away. I choose both, though wisdom sides with the second.
“And yet,” I repeat, stepping a fraction closer, “here you are.” I tower over her as she gazes up at me, and I’m unable to look away. Her beauty is rare, unlike anything I’ve ever seen, carved from some impossible dream I’m sure I’ve had. We stand like this, letting the quiet wrap around us for a moment, before something in her expression snaps.
“I have to go,” she whispers, eyelashes fluttering as she spins around, facing away from me. She starts to walk away, and I fight the urge to reach out and stop her.
“Wait,” I say, almost panicked and I’m not sure where it’s even coming from. “I don’t even know your name.” My voice trembles with sheer desperation, and it’s too late now to hide it. My chest heaves as if my body knows that this will be the last time I ever see her. Slowly, she turns back, lips pressed tight, the weight of indecision warring in her eyes. Then at last, she exhales a single word.
“Snow.”
Snow…
The name settles somewhere in my bones, colder than the ice outside. I close the distance between us before I realize I’m doing it, drawn there by…something.My eyes search hers, a dark instinct stirring from deep within me rising to the surface. A warning? A summons? There’s more to her than meets the eye, more than what she’s letting me see. I can feel it. The hunter in me can also feel it, and I know that there’s something about her answer that doesn’t sit right.
“Why do I feel like you’re lying to me?” I say, my voice cracking. I reach out, brushing the curve of her cheek, lingering like I’m trying to memorize her. “Why do I feel like you’re so much more than that?”Why doesn’t it fit her?The words leave my mouth, and something in my chest tightens, a pressure that spreads beneath my ribs until my heart starts to beat in slow motion, watching as she takes a step back, and then another, before she crosses the room and disappears down the hallway. My body registers the change in space immediately, every nerve ending suddenly aware that she’s about to leave. I move, but I don’t stop her, I just watch as she drifts farther and farther away from me. Why do I want to stop her? To stop her from opening that door. To stay here.
With me.
Her hands curl around the handle, the old brassclicking softly beneath her fingers. Then, she pauses, turning just enough to glance over her shoulder at me.
“Am I?” she says, and before I can answer, she’s gone, leaving me in the silence she left behind. The lingering feeling that something important has just walked away. The woman I’ve watched from afar for years was not a distant figure moving through the edges of my life like she always has. She stood inside my house. This untethered, strange woman.
I won’t insult myself by pretending I’m not at least a little bit thrilled that she’s a mystery to me. It’s a rare thing. My entire life, my entire purpose revolves around the quiet dissection of people. Learning the subtle language of movement and instinct.
I track them.
I anticipate them.
I know them.
Everyone reveals themselves if you’re patient enough to watch closely. Their patterns, their habits, their weaknesses that always emerge like bones beneath thin soil in a rainstorm. Everyone moves in circles they cannot see, and I have made a life out of mapping those circles until there are no surprises left. They repeat themselves in small ways. Routes taken without thinking, words chosen in moments of pressure. The subtle flicker of arrogance that gives them away long before they realize someone has taken notice. It’s my job to notice. And I noticed somethingin my ghost. The woman equivalent to a whisper in the wind that has crawled under my skin.
She’s mystifying.
Sent down to earth to fuck with my head and twist the edges of my self control, because if there’s anyone capable of such a thing I’m betting on it being her.
CHAPTER EIGHT
WINTER
Two years before the present day
20 years old
The orchard is empty in winter.
The branches stretch above me like large dead things, its twigs like gnarled hands clawing at the sky in a fight to prove which of them is still alive. From the outside, they look dead and brittle, but on the inside, they are only sleeping, waiting patiently until spring for their buds to blossom, ready for their summer fruit. I’m not sure why that feels familiar to me, but it does. The snow bites through the light cloth at my back as I lie beneath them, the cold sinking slowly into my skin. At first, it burns, like a thousand knives puncturing my marrow, creeping into every scrape of split skin, every tender bit of flesh that throbs in the hollow of my broken frame.
My breath curls weakly into the air above me, thin white whispers dissolving into the grey sky. The icecradles me, packing itself around my shoulders, melting slowly against my neck and hair. Wetness trickles down my forehead in thin, stubborn rivulets but I’m not sure if it’s from the snow melting with the warmth of my body, or blood.
Every breath drags painfully against my ribs as the familiar body moves in a blur above me, each booted kick to my side sending white-hot, searing pain lancing across my limbs and torso. My chest heaves, but no sound comes. My throat is clenched tight around a scream that will not form. Every nerve is alive with an endless fire as I lie here, taking my punishment, praying that the snow smothers the pain.
Smothers me.
