Page 82 of Rune’s Solace

I was shaking, but I said it again.

“No. Don’t touch me.”

His hand dropped from his cheek.

I was crying now and too angry to care.

“You don’t get to call this home. You don’t get to stand there and act like I came back to you because I wanted to. I came because you had Sawyer.”

“Amy—”

“No!” Louder this time. “You listen to me for once.”

That shut him up. Maybe only because he couldn’t believe I’d said it.

“I got away from you. I built a life without you. I go to school. I have friends. I have people who love me and don’t make me scared all the time, and you don’t get any of that. You don’t get to touch it just because you found me.”

His face started to change.

I knew that look.

God, I knew it.

Once, that would’ve been enough. One little shift around his mouth and I would’ve stopped talking, stopped moving, stopped being anywhere he could reach.

Not now.

I wiped my face with the back of my hand.

“You had to take my best friend and beat him up just to get me in a room with you.” My voice broke, but I kept going. “That’s what you are now. Some sick old man who had to trick me into coming back because you knew I’d never choose you.”

The softness disappeared from his face.

I knew that change. I’d spent a childhood learning that change. And I didn’t stop. That’s the thing I get to keep no matter what happens. I saw the tenderness go out of his face and the other thing come into it, the thing that used to send me inside myself. I stood there in front him my chin up and my fists clenched, not backing down.

“You always did have a mouth on you underneath,” he growled. “Just like her.”

And then he came at me.

I fought him.

I came up swinging and clawing and I got a knee into him and I got my nails down his face and I screamed, and none of it was enough, of course it wasn’t, he was twice my size, he got me by the throat and put me into the wall hard enough that the room went white.

And then the front of the house exploded inward.

* * *

I have never heard a sound like that door made.

It didn’t open. It came off the frame, wood cracking and sunlight pouring into the room, and through all of it came Rune.

I knew him before I could really see him. I was on the floor by then, half out of my head, my father’s hand still around my throat, but I knew the size of him, the way he moved, and for one stupid second all I could think was, He came.

Then I saw his face.

I had never seen Rune look like that.

There was nothing gentle left in him. Nothing of the man who worked in a garden or took my boots off when my feet hurt or lay awake half the night because I needed to hear him breathe. He didn’t yell. He came through that doorway completely silent, looked at the hand around my throat, and went straight for my father.