Page 43 of Ravished By the Revenant

She steps around my hand like it’s furniture.

“Don’t.” She shoulders past me, small and warm and alive, and the brush of her arm against mine is the last touch I may ever get. I stand there like the corpse I am and let her go. Her socked feet slap up the cellar stairs. At the top, she stops but doesn’t turn around.

“For the record,” she says to the castle beyond, “I was trying to stay.”

Then she’s gone, through the kitchen, down the passage, the garden door groaning open and banging shut hard enough to rattle the copper pots.

Schmetterling remains at the foot of the stairs. He looks at the goblet. He looks at me. This time, I swear there really is judgment in his feline eyes. He turns his back, tail straight as a pike, and pads up the steps after her. He is choosing her, as he chooses her always now. At the threshold, he pauses to look back at me the way Konrad used to look at spoiled meat.

“I know,” I tell him.

He leaves.

Then I stand alone in my cellar, in the blue light of my own ruined heart, with the goblet at my feet and her words ringing in my tattered ears.

I was trying to stay.

24

CLARA

The garden dirt is cold through my socks, and I don’t care.

Okay, I care a little. My toes have opinions. But going back inside for my boots means walking past the kitchen, and walking past the kitchen means the possibility of seeing him, and I would rather grow moss on the soles of my feet.

“You know what the funniest part is?” I ask Shmoo, who trots beside me down the gravel path between the cabbages like this is our regular morning constitutional and I’m not having a breakdown in athletic socks. “I defended him. To myself. Multiple times. He’s not like Marco, I said. He apologized, I said. He keeps children’s drawings in Tolstoy, I said.”

Shmoo says nothing, because he’s a cat, and also because he watched the whole thing from the cellar stairs and probably has opinions he’s saving for his memoir.

“And then he stands there with his stupid glowing chest and tells me I’m a woman who says yes when no isn’t on the menu.” I yank a weed out of the strawberry bed for no reason except that it’s there and I need to destroy something. “Like it’s a diagnosis. Like he ran the numbers. Ah yes, subject exhibits classic escape behavior, deploy maximum cruelty.”

The weed comes up with a satisfying rip. I throw it at the compost heap and miss.

“I saw her hair, Shmoo. Her ear. I was standing there holding the biggest clue either of us has found in seven hundred years, and he chose that exact moment to become a courtroom drama.”

Shmoo flops onto the path, rolls in the dust, and looks up at me upside down.

“Yeah,” I sigh. “That’s about how I feel too.”

I do another lap. Past the beans, past the well pump, past the lavender that smells like the bath he drew me, which—nope. Not thinking about the bath. Filed under Later, subfolder Never, cross-referenced with everything else that happened in that tub.

I’m rounding the tomato stakes when I hear boots on gravel.

I know his stride by now. The unhurried warlord stomp of a man who has never once had to rush for anything. I keep my eyes on the tomatoes. The tomatoes are fascinating. The tomatoes have never accused me of anything.

“Clara.”

I say nothing. A cherry tomato is developing a blush on its left side. Riveting stuff.

“Your boots.” Something soft lands on the path beside me. I glance down. My boots, laces tucked in, and… he stuffed dry socks inside them. Rolled. Like little bread loaves.

Damn him and his aggressively considerate acts of service.

“You have been walking on cold ground for two hours,” he says. His voice is missing the arrogance, the command, all of it scraped away like old paint. “You will make yourself ill.”

I sigh. “Seven hundred years and you never learned that ‘you’ll catch a cold’ isn’t an apology.”

“No.” He comes closer. “The apology is that I was cruel to you this morning. I took something you told me in confidence, and I wielded it like a weapon.” He stops and takes a deep breath. “I was an asshole.”