Page 88 of Rune’s Solace

I put my mouth against the top of her head and closed my eyes, because there she was again, coming back in little pieces, and I’d take every damn one of them as they came.

“I love you,” she said, holding me closer.

“I love you, too,” I replied, and pulled us up the bed so we were lying down. I bowed my head, and she came with me until her forehead rested against mine.

For a while I just breathed.

Her fingers slipped into mine. “Rune?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m tired.”

“Then sleep.”

“I don’t know if I can.”

That hurt, but I didn’t let it show.

“Alright.”

She waited, maybe expecting more, and when it didn’t come she asked, “What if I can’t?”

“Then you can’t. We’ll lie here awhile and find out.”

Her eyes searched mine. “No promises?”

For a while she stayed awake. I could feel her fighting it at first, waiting for whatever was waiting behind her eyes, but little by little the tension went out of her and her breathing started to change, getting slower and deeper until mine matched it without me meaning to. I didn’t know anymore which one of us was following the other.

Just before she went under, her fingers tightened once in my shirt. “I feel so safe with you.”

My eyes burned, and I pressed my mouth to her hair. “I’ll always be here.”

She slept.

I stayed awake awhile longer with her warm and breathing against me, one hand spread over her back, listening until I was sure she’d gone all the way under. Then sometime after dark, with the cabin quiet and Amy safe where I could reach her, my eyes closed too.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

TWO DAYS LATER, when the worst of the concussion had lifted and the bruises around my throat had gone from red to a deep ugly purple, I sat up in Rune’s bed in the early evening and said, “I need to talk to you about the thing you know.”

He was at the little table cleaning the same knife he’d already cleaned twice, which was what Rune did when his hands needed a job and the rest of him was somewhere he didn’t want to be. The cloth stopped halfway down the blade.

He set the knife down, didn’t ask what thing, and that was how I knew.

“You know what he did to me,” I said. “All of it. Don’t you.”

“Yeah.”

Just that. No pretending he didn’t understand, no making me drag it out of him.

“Brenda told you.”

“Brenda told me.” He came and sat down. “The day after Sawyer came to me in the parking lot. When we knew there was a man and didn’t yet know who.”

I looked down at my hands.

“She cried through most of it,” he said. “Hated herself for telling me. Kept saying she’d promised you.” He paused. “I don’t want you thinking she handed it over easy, Amy. She didn’t.”