Chapter 2 GUILT AND SURVIVAL

CHAPTER TWO

DARIUS

Three days.

Three days of watching her spiral, and I still hadn't figured out how to pull her back up.

Every time she opened her mouth it was the same thing. I'm sorry, Darius. This is my fault. You lost everything because of me.

The first time she said it, I sat her down and explained myself clearly.

The second time, I had been patient.

By the tenth time, the words made something grind behind my back teeth.

"She has been through a lot," Atlas said quietly. "Even a normal human doesn't just get up and move on like nothing happened."

I grabbed my bag and checked the gun. "Do you think I want her to move on like nothing happened? I lost everything too. The least she can do is get up and help us build something from what we have instead of eating herself alive and have me be her emotional anchor."

Atlas whined low. "I know how you feel about being her anchor. But she's not the one who chose this. You followed her into it. That's a different kind of weight."

I didn't answer that. I zipped the bag shut and pushed out of the tent.

Ravenna was sitting at the edge of the slope with her knees pulled up to her chest, throwing stones one at a time down into the trees below.

Her shoulders were shaking. She didn't hear me come up behind her.

"Are you coming with me into the forest today?"

She didn't look up. The next stone left her hand and disappeared into the green.

I crouched beside her. "Raven."

She turned.

She didn't even bother to hide that she'd been crying, her eyes swollen and red, her cheeks wet. She looked at me for a second, then looked away.

"I want to be left alone. Go do whatever you need to do."

I exhaled through my nose. I couldn't leave her alone out here.

Not after three days ago when I had come back from checking the traps and found her halfway down the eastern slope with her bag on her back, heading nowhere in particular, just heading away.

I'd promised myself after that. She didn't leave my sight.

"Hop on."

She blinked. "What?"

"My back. Get on." I gritted out through my teeth.

"No." She yelled and frowned at me.

"Raven." My voice went flat. "Get on my back or I will drag you through the forest by your arm. Your choice."

She grumbled something under her breath that I didn't catch, then climbed onto my back with all the enthusiasm of someone being marched to their own execution.

I adjusted her weight and started walking.

We were barely five minutes into the trees when she spoke against the back of my neck. "I'm sorry, Darius. I'm so sorry I brought this on you. If I could go back and rewind everything, I wouldn't have let you cross that line with me. I would have stopped you."

I kept walking.

She pressed her forehead into my shoulder. "You had a future. A real one. And I—"

"Raven." I snapped angrily.

What the hell!

"I know you've told me before but I just can't stop thinking—"

"Raven."

She went quiet.

I didn't say anything else. I was past the point of arguing it again. I just walked, and she stayed on my back, and the forest pressed in around us both.

I spotted the deer almost as soon as we reached the lower ground. It's a clean shot.

I raised the gun, steadied my breath, and fired. The animal dropped.

I turned back. "We got a deer."

Ravenna was sitting on a flat stone about ten feet behind me, staring at the fallen animal with the same blank expression she'd been wearing for three days.

"Are you going to help me move it to the camp?" I waited a second to see if she'd move.

She didn't.

I grabbed the deer myself and started hauling it back.

"Darius, I'm sorry. I really am. I keep thinking about your mother's face when you crossed the border. She was screaming your name and I—"

"I know."

"And your father. I know you two weren't close but he's still your—"

"I know, Raven." I sighed because I've no strength in me to tell her to keep quiet.

"And Marcus. You two have been friends since you were kids and now because of me—"

"Raven." I turned to look at her.

"I just can't stop seeing all of their faces and—"

"Then cry." My jaw tightened. "Cry or apologize, I don't care. But stop talking because right now your words are annoying me."

Silence.

Good.

I kept hauling.

The frustration had been building for days and I could feel it sitting heavy in my chest, this low, constant pressure with no clean outlet.

I needed to focus. We barely had food for today.

The water source I'd found was clean but half a mile east.

Winter wasn't here yet but it was coming, and when it came it would hit hard and fast, and a canvas tent with a fire pit dug into mud wasn't going to be enough.

I needed her help. I needed her eyes and her nose and her wolf instincts and her hands.

I needed her present and functional because I could not do all of this alone and also be the thing keeping her from falling apart at the same time.

But she sat when she should move. She stared into nothing when she should be watching the tree line.

She apologized in circles whilst I hunted and built fires and scouted ahead and carried us both on my back, sometimes literally.

At night it was worse. She'd wake up shaking without a sound, just trembling against me in the dark, and I'd hold her until it stopped and never once say what I could see in her eyes.

She'd pulled the elastic band on her wrist so many times in the last three days that the skin underneath was raw.

I'd move her hands away from it each time without making it a conversation because I didn't know how to make it a conversation.

I knew she was going through something she couldn't just climb out of. Atlas had explained that to me at length. I understood it. I did.

But understanding it didn't change the fact that winter was coming and being an emotional anchor to an emotionally detached wolf was not going to keep either of us alive.

On the tenth day, I woke up alone.

I reached to the other side of the bedroll before I opened my eyes. Empty. I sat up fast. Her bag was still there. Her boots were still there. That was something.

But I knew better than to trust that. If she'd decided to leave and didn't want to wake me, she'd go barefoot before she'd make noise.

I pulled on my shirt and pushed out of the tent.

I saw her at the bottom of the slope and exhaled. Then I looked again.

I started walking faster.

She was sitting in the mud at the edge of the low ground where the earth dipped and gathered rain. Not near it. In it.

The mud was halfway up her shins, coating her hands and arms, soaking through her clothes.

She was completely still, staring at nothing.

I stopped in front of her. "Raven. What are you doing?"

She didn't look up.

"You can get an infection sitting in that. Come out."

"I'm tired." Her voice was flat and empty in a way that stopped me cold. "I'm tired of everything, Darius. I can't bear this anymore. I've tried." A pause. "I just can't do it."

Something snapped inside me. I finally lost my shit. Now she's pissing me off.

I crouched down until we were eye level and my voice came out hard. "Listen to me. I am sick and tired of this madness you're beginning to exhibit. You're not the first person to be accused of something beyond her control and banished, and you certainly won't be the last. What is wrong with you?"

I stared at her. "Sitting in mud and playing with death like it's a toy. You think I'm going to beg you to get out? I won't."

My voice didn't waver. "If you want to die, there's an easier way to do it. There's a bullet in my gun. Go pick it up and fire it into your skull if that's what you really want. Because this, sitting here drowning yourself slowly in dirt, is not something I'm going to watch. And besides, it's not going to kill you faster."

Her eyes finally came up to mine.

I held them. "Do you know what love means? And what it doesn't? Love means being present for each other. Love doesn't mean you get to make me your anchor whilst refusing to anchor yourself. It doesn't mean you get to sink so deep into guilt that you can't see we will die out here if you don't choose to survive."

I grabbed her shoulders and shook her forcefully and looked her dead in her eyes. My voice dropped. "Would you rather I had stayed behind? Left you out here alone? Because that was the other option. I crossed that line because you are the woman who owns my soul and I was not going to stand on the other side of it and watch you disappear."

The mud sat cold and wet between us.

"But I cannot do this for both of us." I didn't soften it. "I can't carry us, feed us, shelter us, and hold you together all at once."

My throat worked. "I need you, Raven. I can't do this alone.”