The King of No-one

Rope

She was staring at me with black, empty eyes, breathing hard, growling, and I couldn’t tell if she wanted to jump me and finish it or just cave my skull in with the hammer she was gripping in one muscled hand.

Somewhere in the last five minutes of shifting and unshifting, her singlet had given up on one side — strap gone, the fabric slipped low enough that I caught the curve of a n****e in the neon light before I made myself stop looking, which took embarrassingly longer than it should have, given the hammer. She was trying, visibly, furiously, to be nothing but serious and terrifying, and doing a genuinely excellent job of it, and some traitorous, badly-timed part of my brain was still busy deciding that whatever else tonight turned out to be, I was currently being threatened by the hottest woman I’d ever seen in my life.

“Um… hi,” I said, and got a kick for it from Pete, who hissed through his teeth, “Shut the f**k up.”

She glanced at him, and that’s when I noticed she had the same mark on her wrist — scratched raw, skin ripped in strips, like she’d spent night after night trying to tear it off. I hoped for a second it was an allergic reaction. I doubted it.

“Kade!” she screamed.

“Not really,” I said. She ignored that completely.

“I thought we had a clear understanding that you’d stay inside — that you’d never take one f*****g step outside your f*****g village.”

“Oh my god, here we go again…” I mumbled. “There’s no village.”

I didn’t get to finish the sentence before the hammer whistled past my ear and buried itself in the gyprock behind me. I pulled it out of the wall in one move and threw it straight back at her without thinking.

“Sam, for f**k’s sake, stop it!” Pete shouted. “It’s Rhea! Rhea, stop! It’s not Kade!”

Rhea froze.

“Sam. Step out from behind him. Right now. Say that again.”

“This isn’t Kade.” I said it slower this time. “I know how that sounds. It’s still — I don’t know. It’s still his. Or what’s left of him.”

“Is Kade still in there?” she said. “Or is it just you now? And if it’s just you — where did he go?”

“That’s actually a good question.” I meant it. “He’s definitely not in here. I’d prefer not to have another man in here with me, if you know what I’m saying.”

“This is NOT Kade,” Pete said. “But—”

“Rhea. Sit down..”

She listened to Pete, and I watched the color go out of her face. No more Kade. No more village. No way to bring him back, and the i***t standing in front of her had no idea how to undo whatever the mark had just done. No way to stop the pain. No way to close out the old debt. No way to calm down.

She looked at me and said, “I think there’s just one way to solve it.”

And right after that, the light went out of her eyes. She dropped.

Pete set the bottle back on the table — still full. “Well. I had to do something. Wasn’t planning on knocking her out completely, just wanted to change the trajectory of her thoughts a little.” He looked around. “Where’s the rope? Bring it here. We haven’t told her the main part of all this bullshit yet.”

***

The rope was old, salvaged off a fence line two summers back, and I hadn’t tied anything more complicated than a boot lace in months. My hands didn’t agree. They went to work like they already knew the pattern — cross, loop, tension, cross again — and what came together over her forearms wasn’t the two crude loops I’d meant to tie. It was something with a shape to it. A diamond, tight and even, opening up clean across her skin like it had been waiting there the whole time to be found.

I stopped and looked at it for a second too long.

This body had done this before. Not roughly. Not once, in a hurry, under a threat. Slowly, and more than once, and — I was fairly sure, standing there with the evidence wound around her wrists — for reasons that had nothing to do with keeping anyone from running.

I finished it anyway. Told myself it was practical, that rope tied properly doesn’t work itself loose the way two crude loops do, and that was even true. It just wasn’t the whole truth, and we both knew it, except only one of us was awake to know it.

Whatever the bottle had done to her, it wasn’t doing it evenly. The wolf kept trying to come back, and every time it lost, a little more of her stayed — color climbing up under her skin like something ripening in fast motion, that pale, half-shifted gray filling in warm and full, the way a bruised piece of fruit goes dark and soft and gives everything up at once. Her breathing settled into something slower and rounder. She looked less like a weapon and more like a woman asleep on my floor, wearing a dead man’s careful knots, which was, if anything, worse.

I am not proud of what happened in my head while I finished them. Some deeply unhelpful, entirely uninvited part of me wanted to put my face against her throat and just breathe her in — wet fur and blood and, underneath both, whatever she actually smelled like once you got past the night she’d had. I have never in my life wanted to lick another human being this badly while also actively trying to figure out whose memory I was borrowing to do it.

“You’re staring,” Pete said, without looking up from the knife he was cleaning.

“I’m concentrating.”

“On what, exactly.”

“On not thinking about it,” I said, which was at least honest, and pulled the last knot tight.

Whatever this was — the mark, the rope, the way my hands apparently had opinions I hadn’t been consulted on — it was going to have to wait its turn. She was going to wake up furious, grieving, and beautifully, precisely tied to my counter, and somewhere in the next ten minutes I was going to have to explain all three of those things without also explaining the fourth one.

One disaster at a time.