Page 26 of Keeper of Talon Mountain
And I let him go.
"I should have stopped him." My voice sounds distant, strange. "I should have...”
"You couldn't have stopped him." Zara's tone is surprisingly gentle. "Men like that—the protector types—they'll tear themselves apart before they let someone they love get hurt. Trust me, I know."
Her voice goes flat. Empty. I know that sound—I've heard it in my own voice.
"Someone you knew?"
"My foster brother. Marcus." She's quiet for a moment. "He tried to protect me from our foster father. Got himself beaten half to death for it. And when I finally ran, three years later, I left him behind because I was too scared to stay."
"Zara..."
"He's dead now. Overdose, they said, but I know better." Her hands tighten on the shotgun. "So yeah, I know what it's like to watch someone walk into danger for your sake. And I know what it's like to live with the guilt when they don't come back."
We stand there in the darkening lodge, two women who know what it's like to run. To rebuild. To watch someone walk into danger because of us.
"Gabe's coming back," I say, willing it to be true. "He has to."
"Yeah." Zara doesn't sound convinced. "He does."
The silence stretches between us, filled with the crackle of fire and the wind outside. I can hear every small sound—the settling of the house, the hiss of logs burning, my own heartbeat too loud in my ears.
"Tell me about Derek," Zara says suddenly. "Not the leaving part. Before that. What made you stay?"
The question catches me off guard. "Why do you want to know?"
"Because I stayed too. Three years with Marcus getting beaten while I told myself it would get better. That if I just kept my head down, didn't cause trouble, our foster father would eventually calm down." She's not looking at me, her eyes fixed on the fire. "I want to know if your reasons were as stupid as mine."
"They weren't stupid."
"Weren't they?" Now she does look at me. "What did you tell yourself?"
I sit down slowly, the rifle across my lap. "That he loved me. That the good days made up for the bad ones. That if I could just be better—cook the right meals, say the right things, not make him angry—then he'd go back to being the man I fell in love with."
"And did he?"
"No. He just got better at hiding it from other people. At making me think it was my fault." My throat tightens. "By the end, I believed him. Believed I deserved it. That I was lucky he stayed with someone as broken as me."
Zara nods slowly. "Marcus used to say that. That he deserved it. That he made our foster father angry on purpose to keep the attention off me." Her voice goes hard. "I believed him too. Thought he was protecting me. Took me years to understand he was just as trapped as I was."
"You were kids."
"So were you, in a way. Twenty-five when you met Derek?"
"Twenty-six." The memories feel distant now, like they happened to someone else. "Fresh out of a bad breakup, new city, working sixty-hour weeks at an accounting firm. He seemed perfect. Successful, charming, knew all the right things to say."
"They always do." Zara shifts, the shotgun moving with her. "How long before he hit you the first time?"
"Eight months. We'd just moved in together. I burned dinner." The words taste like ash. "He apologized after. Cried. Said his father used to hit him, that he'd never do it again. Bought me flowers, took me to an expensive restaurant. I forgave him."
"And the second time?"
"Three weeks later. Then two weeks. Then it stopped being about whether I did something wrong and started being about when he felt like it." I force myself to keep talking, even though every word hurts. "The worst part wasn't the hitting. It was the way he made me believe I couldn't survive without him. That no one else would ever want me. That leaving would be worse than staying."
"But you did leave."
"Because I had no choice. But I discovered after I left that my grandmother had given me an out. A place to go where he couldn't follow, enough distance to start thinking clearly again." I look at Zara. "If she hadn't died, if there hadn't been this lodge... I don't know how I would have survived."
