Page 313 of These Tears

‘I’ve been through many things.’ He keeps his voice low. ‘Things I thought would be the hardest I’d ever have to go through.’ His fingertip drifts towards my temple. ‘But listening to you cry on that plane…’ A muscle jumps in his cheek.

The flight to Narvik. I remember the tears disappearing into my sleeve and scarf while his hand kept finding my thigh. I’d thought he was warning me to stop.

He pulls me beneath him before I can say anything else, and Brute abandons the bedside with a disgruntled sound. Elias buries his face into my hair. His mouth finds my pulse, marking the promise with a kiss.

And I hold him there.

Whatever was before has shaped him. Scarred him. Me, as well. It has taken years neither of us can get back.

But it doesn’t get to keep him.

Not while there is someone left to reach for him now that he’s finally started coming out the other side.

‘By the way,’ he whispers, ‘I love you.’

The words hook into my ribs and detonate.

I draw his face closer until his forehead rests against mine, smiling before I’m even aware of it.

‘I love you too,’ I whisper back.

Epilogue

Elias

Twenty minutes would have been enough. Fifteen, if she panicked and forgot everything I taught her. Ten, if she followed the old forestry track because city people have an almost religious faith in paths created by man.

Leah demanded thirty.

I can’t believe we’re fucking doing this now.

I still remember Henrik and Anders appearing at my door the first time, wearing the expressions of men who knew they had fucked up, to tell me the Hunt was underway – but that they had lost the bride. In the fucking mountains. Leah was terrified and unprepared, thinking she had been taken again.

I almost put both of them through the bloody wall.

This evening, though?

She is the one demanding the head start. Setting the rules. Waiting for me to come after her.

Before she was let loose, she smiled at me as though she knew precisely what the additional time would do to me. And this time, every part of the Hunt belongs to her. No masks or hands dragging her places. She chose the route. She set the boundaries. She took the red piece of yarn that ends everything the moment she removes it from her wrist.

The second hand passes the final mark on Anders’ watch.

He holds the leather cover away from its face. ‘Almost.’

I don’t move. If I do, I’ll lose my cool and make mistakes.

Planting both feet in the frost-stiff grass, I listen to the crunch of the soil and the rustle of the trees.

Around me, the clearing lies beneath an iron-grey sky. Yellow birch leaves tremble along the lower slope, and rowan berries burn red between the dark spruce. Early October smells of wet leaves, mushrooms and earth turning towards winter. There’s a brittle crust of frost that lingers where the sun has failed to reach. By midday tomorrow, it should be gone.

And by midday tomorrow, Leah will be my wife.

In every way that matters.

I don’t have to grip this thought hard enough to keep it. Because certainty holds it tethered instead. She will stand beside me because she chose to, knowing exactly what I am and everything I have been.

It almost feels like a small miracle.