Chapter 3 GETTING UP

CHAPTER THREE

RAVENNA

I look at him crouched in front of me in the mud, his voice still rough from everything he just said, and something shifts in my chest.

Just a quiet internal movement, like something that has been braced against itself finally loosening by one degree.

I look at his face properly: The gauntness of it, The shadows under his eyes that have been there since before the border and have only deepened since, The set of his jaw, The way he is holding himself completely still in front of me, not pushing, just waiting.

I understand that he has been doing that for ten days... holding everything up and waiting for me to be ready and has not once put any of it down on me.

The guilt does not leave. It is still sitting exactly where it has been sitting since the border stones disappeared behind us. But I make a decision inside it.

I'm not going to let him down. I'm not going to be the death of both of us in this place. I'm going to survive this wood with Darius by my side.

I look at him and say, "What do you want me to do?"

The sound that comes out of him is somewhere between a laugh and an exhale.

He cups my face in both hands and kisses me once, firm and brief, and when he pulls back his eyes are wet at the corners and he is not going to acknowledge that and neither am I.

"Thank you," he says. "For coming back to me."

I sigh and the air that leaves me takes something with it. "I've lost everything, Darius. The last thing I want is to lose you too."

He looks at me for a moment. Then he stands and reaches down for my hand. "First things first. We need to get this mud off you before you get an infection."

I try to push myself up and my legs buckle immediately. The mud has soaked through everything, my joints are stiff and cold in a way that has gone past discomfort. I grab his arm and try again.

"How long have you been sitting out here?" he asks, pulling me up with both hands.

I press my lips together.

"Raven."

"Before the first light came through."

He goes quiet. He looks at me — my clothes soaked black with mud, my arms coated to the elbow, mud drying at the corners of my jaw — and the disappointment on his face is so plain and contained that it is worse than if he had said something.

He shakes his head slowly and pulls me hard out of the mud. He does not say a word but just turns and starts walking back toward the camp and I follow him.

That afternoon I helped for the first time without being asked.

He is lashing branches into a frame. I come and stand beside him and put my hands on the branches to hold them steady without being told where.

He glances at me sideways.

"What is this for?" I ask.

"We can't survive the winter in the camp," he says, pulling the lashing tight. "The temperature is going to drop and we have next to no medical support out here. If either of us gets sick because we're sleeping in canvas in the middle of a forest in winter, we're finished." He ties off the end and reaches for the next branch. "So we're building a hut."

I look at the frame taking shape in front of us. "That's a good idea."

"I know."

I almost smile. We begin lashing the next section together.

I hold. He lashes. We work around each other without discussion, adjusting by feel, and by the end of the afternoon we have one wall that is rough, imperfect and completely solid.

In the days that follow I learn what my hands are actually capable of.

I learn to pack mud into the wall gaps with my bare palms, pressing it in until it holds, smoothing it down until the gaps seal.

I learn to layer leaves for the roof in overlapping rows, each row slightly lower than the last, until the structure sheds water instead of collecting it.

My hands are wrecked within two days... cracked across the knuckles, sore at the fingertips, permanently cold no matter how close I get to the fire.

I do not mention it. He does not ask.

He builds the bed frame from thick branches lashed together and packs it with dried leaves and our spare clothing.

And it is without question the least comfortable thing I have ever slept on. I sleep better on it than I have slept since the border.

The routine forms without us deciding on it. Hunting in the mornings and continuing building the remainder of the hut in the afternoons. Fire and shared silence at night.

At night I sit with my head against his shoulder and he talks.

He tells me what it was like being Richard Pike's son. Not the version the supernatural world knew; the heir, the hockey captain, the golden boy of Mooncrest but the internal version.

The weight of it and the loneliness of a life built entirely around what was expected of you, where every decision was already made before you arrived in the room, and your only job was to execute it correctly.

"Did you ever want something he didn't plan for you?" I ask one evening.

He is quiet for a moment. "Yeah."

"What?"

He looks at the fire. "I wanted to study architecture. Not pack strategy and business management. I wanted to design things like buildings." A short pause. "I mentioned it once when I was about fourteen. Do you know what he did? He just looked at me like I'd said something in a language he didn't speak and moved on to the next topic."

I do not say anything. I let the silence hold it.

"He loves me," Darius says after a while, in the tone of someone working something out rather than stating something settled. "I've never doubted that. I just spent a long time thinking that love and understanding were the same thing."

He shifts slightly. "They're not."

I think about my own father, probably sitting in his office reading reports about a war he did not start and preparing to hold a fortress for a daughter who is not there. "No," I shake my head. "They're not."

The hut is finished on the fourteenth day.

I know the exact moment it is done because Darius steps back from the roof and looks at it from the outside and does not immediately move to the next task, which is how I have learned to read him. When he stops, the thing is finished.

I step back beside him and look at it. The walls were rough, packed mud darkened from the last rain, a roof that held through two nights of heavy weather without a single leak and one door that opens and closes on leather hinges he fashioned from a belt.

Pride moves through me. Real pride. I built this. We built this. With our hands and mud and branches and fourteen days of cold mornings and aching arms, I am prouder of it than anything I have ever owned.

I turn to tell him and find him already watching me.

His expression is unreadable.

He sighs, quietly, more to the hut than to me, "We need more than this if we're really going to survive."

I reach out, take his hand and squeeze it once.

"We'll survive, Darius."

He looks down at my hand. Then he looks back at the hut. He does not argue with me and he does not agree.

But I understand, standing there with mud still under my fingernails and his hand in mine, that he is already thinking three steps ahead.

That he has been thinking three steps ahead since the border stones.

That this is what he does, what he has always done, and that out here it is not ambition.

It is the thing keeping us alive.

I tighten my hand around his and look at our new home.