Page 111 of Hush

You did not follow.

The words come through the bond with a force that makes me look up. Onyx is watching me with awe, fierce and golden beneath the weakness. Pride in me so strong it warms the mark at my throat.

You hurt. You wanted me. You thought light might be me. Still did not follow. Brave mate. Smart mate. Angry, loud, badly dressed through woods, but did not follow.

A broken laugh bursts out of me before I can stop it. Tears come with it, because apparently that’s where my emotions live now. “You can’t compliment me and insult my crisis outfit in the same breath.”

I can. I did.

“You’ve been unconscious for five days. Maybe take a break from bein’ a menace.”

His mouth twitches faintly. It’s barely there, but I see it, and it nearly breaks me open. Then the humor falls away. He lifts his hand again, not touching this time, waiting. I meet him halfway and press his palm to my cheek because I’m tired of pretending I don’t need it.

I am sorry, he sends, and the words are rough with everything he cannot fit into them. I left to keep you safe from what woke in me. I did not know he waited. I thought he had died—his scent was nowhere in the forest for years. I did not know the bond would close. I did not know you would suffer so long. I should have told you about him before. I should have trusted you with the ugly truth.

The bluntness of it almost undoes me more than any eloquent apology could. No excuses. No trying to soften it with grand, ancient logic. Just the simple truth that he should’ve told me and didn’t.

“Yeah,” I say, and my voice cracks on the one stupid syllable. “You should have.”

I close my eyes. The anger is still there—it doesn’t vanish because his reason was good or because the danger was real. I was alone with a cold bond and a haunted forest, and some part of me is still standing on that porch throwing a stone into the dark.

But he came back broken. He came back saying my name with a mouth that had never known how.

“I’m still scared. And angry. And relieved enough that I kinda hate you for it.”

His thumb moves once against my cheek. Soft hate?

I laugh again, wet and helpless. “Don’t push your luck, Wildheart.”

The bond warms at the nickname, immediate and tender. I lean down carefully, avoiding his shoulder, and press my forehead to his. His breath shakes. Mine does too. The mark on me hums, not cold now, not silent, but alive and aching between us.

“We’re gonna talk about all of it,” I whisper. “Your brother. The Varkhyn. Aestrata. The forest hidin’ shit from me like an overprotective nightmare. You disappearin’. All of it. No more deciding what truth I can handle.”

His eyes close, and the shame in him dips deep. I will try.

I stay there, forehead against his, until the rain softens and his breathing steadies. For the first time in two months, the bond answers every breath I take.

It hurts.

It heals.

It does both, because apparently that’s us now.

And outside my window, the forest stands quiet, no longer empty, no longer cruel, but watching over the den it once hid from me because I was too heartbroken to know the difference between a lantern and a trap.

37

Onyx

I wake before Lucas because his cabin is noisy even when it pretends to sleep.

The cold box hums in the other room with smug persistence. Pipes mutter in the walls. The roof ticks softly as the morning chill gives way to the first pale warmth beyond the windows. The squirrel in the eaves scratches twice, pauses, then scratches again with the confidence of a repeat offender. I make a note to speak with it when my strength returns fully. Lucas said I may not interrogate his squirrel, but Lucas says many things he does not mean to enforce when properly distracted.

He sleeps beside me in the bed, one arm thrown across my stomach, cheek turned into my shoulder, his mouth softened by rest. The bed is still wrong, too soft beneath my spine, too shaped by human ideas of comfort, but his weight makes it tolerable. More than tolerable. His body anchors me in the form I have been trapped inside for too long, and even discomfort becomes something I can endure when his breath moves warm against my skin.

Human form hurts this morning.

I need the forest.