Page 148 of Night of the Witch
“He’s never very far. He told me to let him know the moment you woke up.”
“By screaming at the whole Well?”
She shrugs again. “I took what Brigitta callscreative liberties. Like in the story I’m making—I can change certain things! I can make it different because I want it to be different. It’s my story.”
My grin softens. I smooth a lock of hair behind her ear. “Yeah, Liesel. It is.”
Footsteps pound somewhere over us, a thundering run. My eyes cut up, and I follow the path they take, down a staircase, across a bridge, wrapping around a tree trunk—
Otto sprints into sight, leaping the last few steps. His eyes lock onto mine, and he doesn’t slow, but his face breaks in a wide grin, and he hurries for me, arms extending.
He’s as clean and bright as Liesel, his hair half pulled back into a knot atop his head, a crisp brown tunic belted around his waist, black boots glinting in the light. There’s a bandage peeking out of his sleeve at his wrist and a red cut on his temple, but otherwise, he’s whole, here,alive.
I stumble forward, smiling so wide my face aches, and barely clear the doorway when he swoops in, his arms encasing me gently, testing my limits, my pain tolerance.
“Is this all right?” he asks. “Am I hurting you?”
I squirm against him. “If I’m not fully in your arms in the next two seconds, Otto Ernst—”
He relents, lifting me against him, and I hear the rumble of his chuckle resonate deep in his core. “Demanding, aren’t we?” But there’s palpable relief in his voice.
I let him take my weight, ignoring the sting of the brand on my stomach, the tug of pain from the one on my chest, and just revel in him. The feel of his solidness and the smell of his warmth and the way he rests his mouth on the seam of my shoulder, half kissing the spot, half inhaling me.
Back the way he came, Cornelia appears, flanked by Brigitta and Alois.
“Brigitta!” Liesel cries and races toward her. “I told Fritzi about my story—”
Her voice fades, but I stiffen, knowing why they’ve come. They’ll want to fill me in on what has happened in the meetings, and I do want to know, but I want to pretend, just a little longer. That everything is truly over.
Otto feels my tension, and he tightens his hold on me. “Not yet. Things have waited three days—they can wait a little longer.”
“A little longer? How much longer?” I cut a grin, clinging to the insinuation he might not have even intended.
His chuckle turns into the rumblings of a growl. “Liebste, if I thought your body could at all handle that right now, I would leap from this treehouse and plummet us straight into the bathing pools.”
A thousand jokes are on the tip of my tongue. A hundred ways to torment him, tease him, dissolve into this banter.
But my eyes fix on Cornelia, talking with Liesel, and everything awaiting me rears up again.
He is the single fixed point. The anchor that has quickly become my lifeline.
All I have to give him in return are the raw parts of me.
I push my face to the side of Otto’s head and hold there, a tremor shuddering through my limbs. “There is no healing that can be done to me,” I start, a whisper hung with yearning, “that is more potent than your hands on my body.”
He stumbles, one arm snapping out to steady himself on the wall of the cottage. His jaw bulges beneath my lips, pulse firing against my fingers on his neck, and he dips his mouth to my shoulder again, the bare skin where my shift pulls back.
“You need to rest,” he tells me, tells himself. He doesn’t sound entirely certain, and that dip in his tone funnels every raging thought in me, every twist of fear, into nothing but blissful desire and heat.
Until Cornelia closes the space between us.
I close my eyes.
Otto holds for a beat, waiting for my response, but when I don’t keep pressing him, he sets me on the ground and puts his fingers beneath my chin.
“Fritzi.”
I manage a breath. Steadying, resilient, with him here, with Liesel’s happy giggles tinkering just beyond.
