Page 98 of Her Cruel Redemption

‘Just let me hate you,’ I almost begged.

He seemed to come back to himself, blinking that look out of his eyes, giving one resolute little nod before rising to his feet. ‘You should eat. You’ve been asleep for a long time.’

He went to the fire, stirred the pot on the coals, and I tried to reignite my fury in that echoing hollow of my chest so I could protect myself from whatever other feeling was trying to rise as I watched him balance a bowl on a stone, hook the pot up with a piece of driftwood and hiss when he burned his fingers trying to pour the contents into the bowl. But I couldn't seem to find anything other other than tenderness and sorrow to arm myself with, and that did absolutely nothing but increase the ache of wanting to twine my fingers through his capable hands, press my lips to those calloused palms and pretend he’d never done anything other than care for me.

When he returned to me, I was relieved to fixate on my feral hunger. Hunger, at least, was blessedly clear, with a straightforward cause and solution. I accepted the bowl and spoon and burned my tongue trying to get it into my mouth before it cooled. It took me several mouthfuls before I could even taste it.

‘Slow down. Your stomach will get a shock,’ Draven chided as he watched me eat. I eyed him from between the snarled curtains of my hair, trying to take his advice, but gods was I hungry.

‘What’s in it?’ I asked to delay the next bite.

‘What I could find nearby. Mostly shellfish. Enough for fuel, though maybe not enjoyment.’

I took a few more bites, sitting with the flavour, trying to decide if I liked it or hated it. Perhaps anything tasted edible when you hadn’t eaten in days. When I finished it, I barely refrained from licking the bowl. ‘Thank you,’ I said, staring at the bowl so I wouldn’t have to look him in the eye as I said it.

‘You can have more later. You’ll make yourself sick eating too much too soon.’

I handed the bowl back, and he returned to the fire to pour some for himself. It felt strangely intimate, the fact that he would use the same bowl, same spoon, which was a ridiculous thing to think since there was clearly no other choice.

‘Where has this stuff come from?’ I asked, rising and drawing closer to the fire, holding my hands out to catch some of the warmth. ‘You can’t have just found a pot and utensils washed up on the shore.’

‘It was stolen from a nearby farmhouse. But a long time ago.’

I watched the firelight play across his features, softening some of his sharper edges. ‘You said you escaped through these caverns once.’

He didn’t look up, scraping at his bowl. ‘I was wondering if you’d remember that conversation.’

The reminder silenced me for a long while as I remembered the rest of what he’d said. It felt like he was waiting for me to ask about that part. But I wouldn’t. I couldn’t.

‘Will you please just sit down?’ he said when he’d finished eating and looked up at me where I was still hovering around the edges of the firelight. ‘You’ve barely woken from a magic fever that nearly killed you. You should be resting. Or better yet, sleeping.’

‘I’ve had enough of sleep.’ I crept over to one of the larger rocks near the fire and dropped down onto it. I felt shaky, my legs weak, and my head was starting to ache again. But my sleep had drifted far too close to a kind of dark oblivion than I liked, as though I’d been dallying on the threshold of the shadow realm. I wasn’t anywhere near ready to trust that I’d wake up if I went to sleep again. ‘If you’ve been down here before, do you know where all these tunnels lead?’

‘Yes. That one leads to the surface. The opening is just beyond the city walls.’ He nodded towards a slender mouth in the wall behind me, and I turned to examine it. ‘There are others, but that one’s the most straightforward and least dangerous.’

‘How long were you down here?’

‘A month. Maybe more.’

His reply stung me with an image; of a boy not quite a man hiding down here in the dark, stealing from the surface, terrified of being caught and dragged back to the torment he’d fled from. ‘It must have felt like a very long month.’

‘You could say that.’

My gaze combed the rest of the cavern, taking it in slowly, fixating for a moment on the strange tidal pool that seemed to seep in beneath the rock. The water level rose and fell rhythmically, and there was a glow of light turning the water a crystalline blue, like there was sunlight touching it somewhere out of sight. ‘What happened after I fell?’

‘The sea was pretty wild with the storm. It was the most I could do to just keep us above water until we were washed ashore on the far side of the harbour. There was an opening to the cave system near where we washed up, so I carried you here.’

A lump rose in my throat as I imagined it. Him trying to swim, to hold our heads above crashing walls of water in a burning ocean. Carrying my limp body along a rocky beach in the dark. Watching his means of escape and survival slip out of the harbour. I still couldn’t fit it together, couldn’t understand it, couldn’t understandhim,this man who seemed to think nothing of taking lives and then would risk himself like that. Risk himself forme.

‘So Port Howl is where Lidello held you,’ I said, hating saying the man’s name and watching Draven’s shoulders tense up. ‘That’s why you’re here.’

A silence fell. He seemed to struggle with what to say.

‘You don’t even want to explain it to me?’ I pushed when the silence stretched too long. ‘You don’t think you perhaps owe me some kind of justification for all you’ve done?’

‘I’m trying.’ His throat worked as he swallowed, and he finally took his eyes from the fire to look at me. ‘I promise you, I am. None of this is easy to talk about. Just… give me a moment.’

I held my tongue, watching him, waiting to see if he would finally crack open and reveal some of what I’d only ever learned in snatches from other people.

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