Chapter 5
She had been on her knees in the blood-slicked mud, her magic flaring in wild, desperate terror, throwing her consciousness straight into the fortress of his mind while his blade was three inches from her neck.
She hadn't tried to kill him; she didn't have the power to break a mind that hard. Instead, she had scrambled through the dark corridors of his thoughts, weeping, frantic, seeking anything—any crack, any unhealed grief—and found a locked iron door deep in his past. A memory of a girl. A failure that had broken his youth into jagged pieces.
With the frantic, bloody fingers of her soul, she had torn down that door, seized that buried agony, and re-anchored it to herself.
*You failed her once,* her psychic scream had echoed in his skull. *You will not fail her again. I am your charge. I am your breath. I am the reason you do not rot in hell.*
When he had opened his eyes, the broadsword had fallen from his fingers. And he had knelt.
Now, sitting beside that same fire, watching him pour bitter willow tea into a tin cup, Aveline felt an icy void opening beneath her ribs.
"Garrick," she began, her voice barely louder than the crackle of a pine needle.
"Drink," he said, turning and offering her the tin cup.
Their fingers brushed as she took it. The contact sent a sharp, electric jolt through her chest. Garrick did not pull away immediately. His knuckles rested against hers, his thumb lingering against the soft skin of her wrist.
He sat down beside her on the oilskin, so close that his broad thigh pressed against hers, radiating a heavy, grounding heat that banished the damp chill of the stone.
"You look troubled," he said, staring into the flickering embers. "More than usual. Hollowmere is behind us. Two days, three at most, and we hit the mountain passes. The sanctuary monks have wards that can hide an army. You will be safe."
"And you?" she asked, her throat tight. "What will happen to you?"
Garrick gave a low, dry chuckle that rumbled in his chest. "I told you. I stay where you are. A cottage, perhaps. Some land where the soil isn't poisoned by old wars. I can build a wall. I can plant turnips." He glanced sideways at her, a self-deprecating glimmer in his eye. "Though I suspect you'll have to manage the garden. I have a habit of pulling up the roots with the weeds."
The domestic fantasy hung in the air between them—fragile, beautiful, and utterly hollow.
"Why?" she whispered, unable to stop the poison from leaking out. "Why do you want that, Garrick? You could have taken a hundred contracts. You could be a lord's master-at-arms. You could have gold, women, wine. Why throw your life away in the mud for me?"
Garrick’s face settled into an expression she had never seen before—an aching, vulnerable quiet that stripped away ten years of war.
He leaned his head back against the granite slab, looking up at the smoke swirling toward the chimney cleft.
"I had a sister," he said quietly.
Aveline’s heart seized. The air turned to lead in her throat.
"Her name was Kaelen," Garrick continued, his voice dropping into a register so raw it sounded like freshly peeled bark. "She was younger than me by four winters. She had dark hair, like yours. Same stubborn chin. Same way of looking at a man like she could see every petty, ugly thought he was trying to hide."
Aveline couldn't move. She couldn't breathe.
*Kaelen.*
She remembered that name. She had seen it carved into the deepest, most scar-tissue-encrusted chamber of his subconscious during the siege. She had ripped that name apart to weave her own into its place.
"We were in the border marches," Garrick whispered, his fingers curling into a tight fist against his knee. "During the Red Spring. The raiders came through our village while the militia was two leagues away chasing shadows. I was sixteen. I thought I was a soldier because I had an iron shortsword and could skin a deer."
He paused. A violent shudder passed through his shoulders—not from the fever, but from an agony that time had failed to dull.
"They cornered her in the grain cellar," he murmured. "I ran. I heard her scream my name, Aveline. Three times. *Garrick. Garrick. Garrick.* And I... I dropped my sword in the nettles and crawled beneath the mill race like a dog. When the militia came back the next morning, there was nothing left of the cellar but ash and bone."
A tear slipped silently down Aveline’s cheek, burning like lye.
"Garrick, don't..." she choked out.
"I spent twelve years running," he said, looking at her then, his amber eyes shining with unshed tears that magnified the firelight. "Selling my steel to whoever had coin, killing men I didn't hate, taking wounds I didn't care to heal. Because a dead man doesn't have to remember the sound of a cellar door burning."
He reached out. His large, rough hand cupped her cheek, his fingers sliding into the dark silk of her hair. The touch was so infinitely tender, so heavy with genuine, agonizing adoration, that Aveline felt her soul fracturing down the center.
"And then," he whispered, his thumb catching the tear on her cheek, "I found you."
*No,* her mind screamed. *No, no, no.*
"When I looked at you that day in the ruins," Garrick murmured, leaning in until his breath was warm against her parted lips, "the fire went cold. The screams in my head... they stopped. For twelve years, my ribs were empty. But when I saw you on your knees in the mud, looking up at me with those dark eyes... I knew the Gods had given the coward one last chance."
He rested his forehead against hers. Their breaths tangled in the freezing air of the cave. She could smell the pine needles on his skin, the sharp salt of his sweat, the bitter iron of his fever.
"You aren't a burden, Aveline," he whispered against her mouth. "You are my absolution. If I bleed to death on this mountain to keep you breathing for one more sunrise, it is the only clean thing I will have ever done in this wretched life."
His lips brushed hers.
It was not the hungry, violent kiss of a sellsword. It was a plea. A vow. It was soft, hesitant, sweet as crushed clover, tasting of salt and desperate devotion.
Aveline’s eyes fluttered shut. For three glorious, agonizing heartbeats, she surrendered to it. She leaned into the solid, burning wall of his chest, her hands clutching at the coarse linen of his shirt, pulling him closer. She kissed him back with a fierce, weeping desperation born of sheer terror—longing with every fiber of her being for the lie to be real, wanting to crawl inside this fantasy where he loved her, where she had saved him, where they could build that cottage by the river and let the world burn itself out.
His arm wrapped around her waist, crushing her against him with a possessive, trembling tenderness. He groaned softly into her mouth, a sound of profound, unburdened relief, as if a man dying of thirst had finally found water.
