Deception

Chapter Forty-Nine RACHEL

I press the fingernails of my left hand against my right forearm. Thin white crescents on blackened crimson. Somewhere beneath this wound—beneath my skin—redemption flows. I just have to dig deep enough to find it.

My hands shake. My fingertips are colorless and cold.

Guilty.

Alone.

Broken.

I strain to feel it. The weight of my crimes. My heartbreak. I want to reverse my choice—take back the part of me that made me human—but I’ve pushed the grief so far away from me, I no longer know how to find it. All that’s left inside of me is silence, dense and absolute. A poison that promised peace but delivered hell. It fills all my secret spaces and pushes at my skin until something, somewhere, has to give.

Gripping the wound with shaking fingers, I slowly slide my nails against the jagged seam of broken flesh. A thin line of crimson wells up. The pain hits a second later, sharp and stinging, and I’m grateful.

Finally.

Something real. A tiny piece of the hurt I should be feeling. A small slice of the punishment I know I deserve.

The blood beads together, swells, and plummets down my arm and off my fingertips in shining red drops.

A harsh sob tears through me, choking me with its ferocity, and I slash another line of crimson into the wound.

The pain crawls up my arm, and my tears slide off my face to mingle with my blood on the soft white blanket covering me.

I can feel this. Why can I stand to feel this—this small, petty thing—but I can’t stand to feel the loss of Dad and Oliver? The horror of killing Melkin? The still-gaping wound of Sylph’s death?

I scratch at my arm, and pain is a fire-breathing monster underneath my skin, but it isn’t enough. Not even close. The hurt is too small. The blood offered isn’t nearly what I owe.

The killer was wrong. Pain hasn’t made me feel alive. It’s proven that nothing I do will ever be enough to unbreak all the shattered pieces of the girl I once thought I’d be. I bleed and bleed, but still the blood of those I’ve lost is stronger.

And already the first scratch is congealing. Hardening.

Healing.

How dare my arm heal when I can’t? I scratch at it again, opening it wider. Digging deeper. The sobs racking my chest are heaving, desperate things tangled up with words—meaningless half sounds that flay the air but fail to give voice to the awful, consuming silence that refuses to let me go.

“Oh, Rachel.” Quinn climbs out of his bed on unsteady legs, moves to my side, and swiftly wraps his arms around me.

I reach for my wounded arm again.

“Stop.” Quinn’s voice is firm. “Rachel, stop.”

But I can’t stop. If I do, the hurt will subside. The skin will knit itself back together. And I’ll be a prisoner to the silence again.

Quinn’s fingers grip my left elbow and squeeze. There’s a sharp pain as a nerve is pinched, and then a buzzing, like a swarm of mosquitos trapped beneath my skin, races down my arm.

My suddenly numb fingers fall to the bloody blanket. Useless.

I turn on him, my right fist covered in blood, and punch his chest, his stomach, anything I can reach. My blows are weak; the burned muscle refuses to lend me any strength. He absorbs it without complaint while I pant and sob and push words at him as if by hurting him I will somehow feel better.

“Let go. Let. Me. Go.” I choke on my tears, and try to twist away from him.

“If you stop hurting yourself.”

“I can’t. Don’t you see that? It’s all I have left.” My chest aches as I gulp down air only to have it tear its way to freedom in a wail of anguish.

“No, it isn’t.” His voice is quiet as he reaches past me to grab a tin of salve. “You have Logan. Us. And most importantly, you have yourself.”

I sob quietly as he smears the clear aloe over my wound. It turns pink where it mixes with my blood. The pain throbs, but the sharp spikes are already fading.

Soon, I’ll be left with nothing but silence again.

“I don’t have myself,” I whisper, too desperate to let shame seal the words inside of me. “Not anymore. I’m lost. I’m broken, and I can’t fix it.”

He remains quiet while he carefully bandages my arm, and I realize his fingers are shaking, his breathing is harsh, and he looks pale. He inhaled too much smoke saving my life to be out of bed fighting to save it again.

“You may have lost your way, but you”—he points to my heart—“aren’t lost. You’re still in there. And you have everything you need to heal. You just have to find the courage to do it.”

“Sit down, Quinn, before you fall down.”

I pull my knees up to my chest, and he eases himself onto the middle of my cot and sits cross-legged, facing me.

“I don’t like to tell my story,” he says. The words are full of pain. The kind of pain I know runs deep beneath my silence. “But I think you need to hear it. Will you listen?”

He waits for my answer, his dark eyes watching me with a strange mix of dread and compassion. I nod.

Leaning his forearms on his knees, he splays his large hands over the white blanket, careful to avoid the blood I left behind. “My village is different from other Tree Villages. When we were formed in the aftermath of the Cursed Ones, the founders had to decide on a system of government. They chose to assign duties to each family based on that family’s skill set. So someone who was good at baking would then become the baker, and someone who was good at farming would be in charge of growing the wheat. Make sense?”

“Yes.”

“Whatever job your family was assigned, that was your family’s job for the duration of your life in the village. If you were a schoolteacher, then you trained your children to be schoolteachers. If you were a leader, then you trained your children to be leaders. No one was allowed to switch jobs. Our leaders decided this would help our society run without conflict. From birth, every child knew his place and had no aspirations for anything different. And only those specifically trained to be experts in a field would be doing that job.”

“I guess that makes sense.”

He looks at his hands as though he can see something I can’t. “Our family was in charge of protecting the village from outside threats.”

“That makes sense, too.”

His hair slides along his cheek as he raises his face to look at me. “Why?”

“Because you and Willow are scary good at fighting, weapons, and basic survival.”

He laughs, but it sounds like it hurts him. “Scary good. Yes, we are that. My father was a boy when the previous civilization was destroyed. He was only fifteen when he joined the village. He couldn’t farm, couldn’t build, and couldn’t fix things. He was good at only one thing: killing people.”

I don’t know what to say to this. Quinn’s long fingers clench handfuls of blanket.

“He taught us only to be good at killing people, Rachel. That’s all we knew. We hunted humans like you hunt animals. Learned their weaknesses and how to exploit them. How to extract every possible ounce of pain if we needed information from them.”

He falls silent, and the cords on his neck stand out. I reach across the blanket and cover his hands with mine. “You can’t help who gave birth to you. You can’t blame yourself for what he taught you, or what he expected from you.”

He looks at me. “No, I can’t. And I don’t. But that doesn’t make the memories easier to face. Every time I killed, it took another piece of me until I was afraid I’d have nothing left. I didn’t take joy or pride in it like he did. And he saw that in me. He called it cowardice.”

My lip curls. “He’s a fool. I call it courage.”

He turns his hands over and laces his fingers through mine. “Your father called it courage, too. I’d started to stand up to my father. Started killing people quickly even when he wanted them tortured. Started refusing to search for highwaymen or trackers to kill unless they were actually threatening the village.”

“And he punished you?”

“He punished Willow. He gave her the duties he’d formerly given to me. He expected her to stalk and hunt and torture and glory in it. And she . . .”

“She did,” I say, because I can see it’s true. Willow wouldn’t back down, especially if she thought that by doing what was expected of her she could somehow save her brother pain.

“She did.” His eyes are steady as he looks at me. “And then we captured Jared, and I refused to kill him. I knocked my father unconscious and took Jared to the leaders so they could detain him while we tried to decide if he was a legitimate threat. And Jared was . . . kind.” His hands squeeze mine. “He was kind, Rachel. He didn’t see Willow and me as monsters like the rest of the village did. He treated us with respect, and my father couldn’t stand it.”

I know what’s coming, and a slick, icy dread fills my stomach.

“He turned Willow loose. Ordered her to kill Jared, and make it truly awful, or I would pay the price.” He pauses and then says quietly, “And so I killed my father.”

The breath I don’t realize I’m holding explodes from me in a rush. I’d thought he was going to tell me he killed my father to spare Willow. But instead, he’d sacrificed another piece of himself to save both his sister and a man he barely knew.

“Quinn . . .”

“I didn’t tell you that so you could feel sorry for me. I told you because I know what it’s like to make choices that leave you with nothing. I know how it feels to be so broken you think nothing will ever make it right.”

He leans forward. “Rachel, I know the pain scares you. It should, because healing is so much harder than being hurt in the first place. But you will never get better until you stop running and start looking things in the eye. Until you give the things that hurt you the label they deserve, feel the way they make you feel, and then let the pieces slowly settle until you can breathe again.”

I shiver beneath the intensity of his gaze. “I don’t know how to do that.”

“Start small. Pick up one piece of it, look it in the eye, and let yourself feel it. You won’t break, Rachel. You’ll heal.”

I shake my head. There’s so much. Where do I start?

He rubs his fingers lightly across my knuckles, and waits until I meet his eyes. “Sylph is dead, Rachel. She’s gone. You didn’t get enough time with her, and that isn’t fair. You loved her, and now she’s gone.”

My body trembles as his words slam against the silence within me, leaving a spiderweb of cracks in their wake. “No,” I say, as though by protesting, I can push the truth away from me.

“Yes. This is true, and you won’t be whole again until you learn how to live with the truth, even when it hurts. Sylph is dead.”

Grief surges out of the silence, hot and sharp and utterly devastating. It wraps around my chest, crushes the air from my lungs, and sinks into every inch of me. I open my mouth to give voice to the horrible keening locked deep inside of me, but the air won’t come. I’m choking on the memories. On the way her eyes lit up over every little thing. On the smile she gave to everyone else and the smile she reserved just for me.

“Oh.” Air rushes past my lips, and the grief becomes a creature of terrible strength determined to turn me inside out as tears pour down my face, and I sob her name.

His arms wrap around me as I cry and cry and cry. He doesn’t tell me it’s okay. He doesn’t try to calm me down. He just holds me and lets me cry.

When the knife-sharp edge of the grief eases into a dull ache, I find I can touch Sylph’s face in my memory without falling to pieces. It hurts, and maybe it always will, but by letting what she meant to me fill me up and spill me over, I find that a few of my ragged edges are a little smoother. A little less scary.

Quinn pats my back, and I realize I’m nearly in his lap with my face pressed to his chest, and I have no idea how long I’ve been there. I push away and wiggle back to the top of the cot, and someone clears his throat in the doorway. We glance over and Logan is there, looking like he did when he stood on the Claiming stage beside me, forced to give permission for another man to take me as his wife.

I open my mouth to explain, but he doesn’t even look at me as he says, “Quinn, a word please?” and then walks out of the room.