Hunted(65)

“Yeva, this story . . .” Lena shook her head, her brows drawn in. “If it were anyone but you I would call her a liar.”

“It’s the truth,” Yeva said. And yet there were pieces of the story she hadn’t told them, fragments she kept to herself without knowing why: the way the Beast’s voice changed when he said I instead of we; the way he smelled of spice and wind, except when snowmelt dampened his fur, when he smelled a little like a wet dog; how familiar the soft whisper of his paws on the stone floors had become; his eyes, as they met hers, right before she cut his throat.

She told herself it was because they would not believe those details, but in her heart she knew that wasn’t the reason. Though she could not put the real reason into words.

“I believe you.” Asenka slid from her chair onto the rug next to Yeva with a sigh, and stretched her feet out toward the fire. “But it will take some time before any of us understand.”

“I know.” Yeva’s lips twitched. “I don’t even understand yet. I just know that seeing you, and knowing you’re here and safe . . . when I saw the empty cabin I feared something terrible had befallen you.”

Lena had been avoiding Yeva’s eyes—watching her, but looking away whenever her youngest sister glanced up. She finally let her breath out in a rush and bent over, face in her hands. “Oh, Yeva. I’m so sorry.” She burst into tears.

Alarmed, Yeva glanced at Asenka, but she wouldn’t meet her eyes either. “It’s all right,” Yeva said, sliding forward on the rug toward the love seat until she could take Lena’s hands. “I’m fine. None of this was your fault.”

Lena lifted her head, eyes brimming and face starting to redden and swell. “No, no—Yeva, I w-wanted to leave the cabin when spring came. I believed you were dead and I wanted to come home, and I was the one who told Solmir to stop. . . .” Her voice petered out, and she shook her head, unable to continue.

“You were the one who told him to stop looking for me,” Yeva finished for her, gently.

Lena glanced at Asenka, then nodded.

“You did right.” Yeva squeezed her hands. “You couldn’t know I was alive.”

“Asenka did!” Lena blurted through her tears. “She begged us to stay through the summer. She refused to believe you had died.”

Yeva squeezed Lena’s hands again and looked across the rug to Asenka, whose eyes were on the fire. Yeva bent her head and kissed her sister’s hands. “None of that matters,” she said firmly. “I don’t think anyone can find the Beast’s valley unless he wants them to—Solmir would not have found me if he had searched for a thousand years. Lena, you did the right thing. I’m so happy to find you all here.”

Lena mumbled something and wrapped her arms around Yeva’s neck, and they stayed that way for a time until Yeva told her to go join her husband, and sleep. She did so reluctantly, pausing on the third step to look back toward the fire, and the sister she’d thought she’d lost, before vanishing upstairs.

Yeva crawled back over by the hearth until she was near enough to Asenka to curl up as she used to do when she was a child, head in her older sister’s lap, fingers grasping at her skirts as though they were a comforting blanket. Asenka bent her head and kissed Yeva’s temple, and Yeva felt a tremble in her lips. She felt the patter of a tear hitting her cheek, and then another, but before she could look up, Asenka’s hand began to stroke the dirty, muddy hair back from Yeva’s face, and Yeva did not want to move for fear she would stop.

She fell asleep like that, and her last thought was of waiting to feel the next tear fall from Asenka’s face to hers.





BEAST


I cannot continue.

The wolf is too strong. With her I could . . . I was . . . but the animal within is angry and his anger makes him strong. He wants us to hunt, and feed, and run through the wood. He wants us to exist as instinct and whim, quick and brutal as winter. My thoughts drive his mind as mad as his instinct poisons mine. But I remember what I was, and it makes me weak. My despair is mine alone, and I am so tired.

Can’t keep . . . no point. Curl up. Let him. I’ll fade.

Disappear.





TWENTY


YEVA ASSUMED SHE’D FEEL the itch to hunt, after it had become such a habit. That the town would seem crowded and dirty and loud, that the house would feel small after having lived in a castle. Instead it surprised her how easy it was to come back from the dead.

News spread through the town like the howling winter wind, so quickly that Yeva did not have to tell her story to anyone, because they already knew. Most of them had heard it entirely wrong, for the stranger the story, the more elaborate it became in the retelling—but she felt no urge to correct them.

And while her body was used to far more exercise than she could get strolling around town, it soon understood it was not being called upon to prowl through snow-covered forests or sprint after wild beasts, and settled.

She was not invited to rejoin the baronessa’s circle of ladies, no doubt because no one quite knew what to make of her, whether she had spent the winter with an unmarried man under a curse or if she’d spent it in the bed of a wicked monster. Though neither was true, Yeva was hardly surprised that such doubts would prevent her from reentering high society. And since the baronessa’s solarium was the one aspect of her life at home that she hadn’t missed at all, that suited her perfectly.