Forbidden Temptation

Chapter Four

I ran—so far as my body still remembered how to run. The dark forest floor strewn with pine needles muffled the sound of my steps, but it didn’t soften the pain that whimpered beneath my ribs with every stride. The blade of cold air cut into my lungs, my throat burned as if it had been scoured inside with salt. My cloak was heavy; its hem slapped at each step, the blood-soaked fabric whispering softly against my thigh. My hair stuck to my face, sweat left salty streaks at the corner of my mouth. I wasn’t thinking—I couldn’t. My body remembered: forward, to the right, avoid the jutting bones of the roots, slip half a motion under the fallen fir, twist my shoulder aside when the branch whips back.

“One more step,” growled the wolf inside me, hoarse but resolute. “One more.”

After every “one more,” another “one more” came, while the world cinched tight around my chest. The tree trunks stood like tall, dark pillars; between them the moonlight slid down like a thin silver knife. The strong, deep scent of pine resin filled my nose, but the sweet, metallic smell of my own blood always settled over it like a shadow that clung to me.

The ground wavered underfoot: here soft needles, there hard-packed trail, farther on stones and roots. My ankle twisted in protest, pain lanced my hip, yet I kept running. I didn’t dare look back. My gaze latched forward, onto every tiny patch of light, every freer strip, as if salvation waited just beyond the next bend.

Then my foot caught on a root. The world leapt forward; I was left behind. I crashed to my knees, the skin split beneath my left one, and the cold mud bit into the heat blooming from the wound. My palm slammed into the soil, black, wet humus jammed beneath my nails. The air flew out of me, and I lay there like a fish cast up on shore, helpless, silent, snapping at the cold with my mouth from the dark.

At once my wolf curled over me inside, as if trying to hammer the momentum of the fall into armor.

“Breathe,” it commanded. “Don’t stop.”

I obeyed. The first breath dragged shards of glass down my throat; the second cut less; with the third the cold reached my brain and the world switched back on. My knee throbbed, my ribs protested every rise of my chest, a dull, heavy cramp lurked deep in my belly. Warm wetness began to flow again along my inner thigh, and I clutched my stomach with a crazed, instinctive motion. Beneath the skin I couldn’t feel that small, secret flutter I had been guarding for days. Only emptiness and pain.

“No…” slipped out of me. It wasn’t a voice, only air.

My wolf sobbed softly. Not a howl, not a shattering—this was the kind of crying that seeks no witness. Like ice cracking under snow where no one hears. I felt it draw aside within my chest to make room for the pain—not hiding, only not standing in its way.

“He took it,” it said at last, its voice little more than a tremor. “He took it from us.”

The word—took—banged against the inside of my skull, made the rounds, then dropped somewhere I couldn’t reach. The world collapsed. The trees, the wind, the moon—they all watched as I pressed my forehead into the mud and dug my fingers into the earth. The smells—pine, damp, blood—mixed in my mouth. My stomach heaved, and the empty retching lashed my throat like a switch.

The tears didn’t come at first. Only breath. I wanted it steady, to the rhythm of my wolf, but between each beat yawned a hole, a skip that wasn’t from me but from what was no more. My fingertips searched my belly for that infant hush that had been warm and mysterious that afternoon—now a cold, deep nothing gaped in its place.

“Why?” I rasped. Not to Robert—he wasn’t here. Not to the night—it does not answer. To myself? To my wolf? To the world? “Why?”

Nothing replied, but the course of the wind shifted and a long sigh ran over the crowns of the trees. At its movement a sound unfurled out of me. First a single ragged, painful breath, then a bare, ugly sobbing—the kind one allows oneself only when alone. I wept with my whole body: my shoulders shook, my wounds ached, the blood kept streaming unrelenting, and sounds broke from me I hadn’t known existed.

Images flashed through the sobbing. Too sharp to be real, too soft to call a dream. A tiny hand laid in my palm. A cradle made by the smith, of pine and beech, strong and fragrant. A small shape toddling across the castle yard, my wolf circling in reverent, proud, wary loops. A voice I had never heard and yet knew was tied to my heart. Branded to each image like a burned seal lay the fact: only an image now. It would become nothing more.

The crying ebbed, then surged again. The darkness stood motionless between the trees, and the moonlight glittered so cold on the needles it might have been dusted with ground glass. An owl swept over me, silent; as it turned, its wing cut a brief shadow across the ground. The scents of game—fox, hare, deer—layered the air, and the smell of my own blood ruled them all, as if a warning sign I could not scrub from myself.

“We can’t bear it,” I whispered. My voice crackled. “It’s too much.”

“We can,” my wolf answered. Not comfort. Decision. “Because we must.”

In my chest that word—must—caught on a rib and held while I drew another breath. Slowly my body stopped shaking, but the grief did not subside. My tears still ran—warm, stinging on my cold cheeks. My forehead rested on muddy ground; the cool, woody scent of the mud was joined by salt on my tongue as I licked the corner of my mouth.

I waited to see if the pain would die. It didn’t. It changed. Its biting edge grew duller, wider, like a big warm stone set in the center of my chest. That, I could carry—not lighter, only different. My arms slowly eased from my belly, my hand slid to the edge of the earth, and my fingertips rolled a ball from the wet humus between the needles, then crumbled it. The motion soothed me—something I did that didn’t hurt worse than before.

“We can’t stay here,” my wolf reminded me. “The smell of blood calls what is hungry. And it calls him, too.”

At the word—him—my gut clenched again. I saw Robert’s face towering over me: the eyes burning red, the tremor of rage at the corner of his mouth, and movements with nothing left of what had once been human. You’re no use, you or the whelp. The end of the sentence snapped in my head like a cold gate slamming shut. The wind ran through the trees again. I felt its motion in my viscera.

I pushed to my knees. My knee protested, needles stabbed the wound, my hip tightened. My hand went from the ground to a trunk; its bark was ridged, imprinting striped marks into my palm. I drew a deeper breath. My wolf breathed with me: slowed the tempo, and there was something ancient in its rhythm—something that had outlived winters and plagues and wars. My heartbeat fell in line—not calm, only more followable.

I stood. The forest seemed at once smaller and larger: smaller because the spaces between the trees were filled with my shadow, larger because there were more stars between the branches than I could ever count. My cloak’s hem stuck to my knees. The cold bit through the cloth, cuts and bruises spoke up again and again, but they no longer stopped my legs.

“Where?” I asked.

“Down the slope,” my wolf said. “Toward the stream. The water will wash the scent away. The stones will cover you. There’s a den at the sheer bank under a fallen trunk. We’ll rest there.”

I set off along the hillside’s fall. I kept my steps short; long steps spill you, short ones hold. I pushed branches aside with one hand, braced on bark with the other. Sometimes I stopped and listened. No sound came from the direction of the keep—or none I could hear. The forest sounds lived: something tiny squeaked under a leaf, farther off a deer crashed through brush, a fox circled below on the stones and caught my scent, then grew wary.

The sound of the stream reached me before the stream itself. Its chiming as it welled from the rocks was thin and clear, as if played on glass. When I reached the silver ribbon glinting among the stones, I knelt. The cold bit my hands so fast it was as if my skin whimpered. Red eddies swirled in the water, then the current carried them off. I took off my cloak and spread it on the bank. A dark band ran along the fabric’s edge—I didn’t look long. I washed the blood and mud from my thighs, my knee, my shins as best I could. Not to be clean—to be less noticeable. With my fingers I mapped the bruises on my hip and around my ribs; the chart of pain rose like the relief of an unknown land. I didn’t touch my belly long; I only laid my palm there a moment—as if in farewell—then withdrew it.

Sitting at the water’s edge I felt at once terribly light and terribly heavy. The lightness came from the loss—as if a part of my body, the weight that pulled me toward the future, had been torn out. The heaviness came from there too: a stone I must carry from now on. My wolf didn’t push or pull. It was simply there. I felt the warmth of its fur inside my head, its weight as it sat down beside me. Invisible, and utterly real.

“If you go back, he’ll kill you,” it said softly. “If you stay here, the hungry will find you. If you go on, there’s a chance. Choose.”

“On,” I answered. My voice barely trembled. “On.”

I wrung out the cloak as much as I could, then put it back on. The wet bit into my shoulders, but motion would warm me. Moving along the stream, I kept to the cover of the stones, where the moonlight reached only in broken pieces. At the bank there was the fallen trunk my wolf had spoken of: its roots frozen into the air like the teeth of a comb, and the mouth of a hollow gaped dark where it had scooped the earth away. I wedged myself inside. The ground was cold, the air clammy, among the roots dry leaves, hairs, traces of old den-dwellers. I pulled moss beneath me and, though it was still hard, it bore me.

My first instinct was to curl up. My ribs protested, my belly too, drawing my knees hurt—yet there was something primal in that posture, something the wolf and the human know in common. I wrapped my arms around my stomach and laid my forehead on my elbow. The sounds of the outer world came in muted: the chiming of water, distant steps, the trees’ murmur, my own breath.

Another wave of grief came slower but reached deeper. It didn’t shake my body—it filled it. I wept quietly now, my tears soaking into the coarse fabric, leaving only the taste of salt in my mouth. The images returned—they wouldn’t leave. I didn’t want them to. Now I knew: these would be my stones to lay before me, so there would be something to step on as I went on.

“I swear,” I whispered, speaking to the roots, to the earth, to the water, to the moon—to anything that hears. “Never again will I give myself up so helpless. Never again will I let anyone take what is mine. I won’t forget. I won’t forgive. I will survive.”

My wolf rumbled. Not approval—understanding. As its sound settled around me, the trembling in my chest eased by degrees. The air I drew reached deeper. The sweat cooled on my brow. The throbbing of my wounds shifted into a dull, manageable rhythm.

“You need to rest,” my wolf observed. “For a little while. Not long. Until first light.”

“I’m afraid to sleep,” I admitted. “Afraid of what I’ll wake to.”

“I’ll keep watch,” it said. “I’ll be your ears. I’ll be your teeth. Sleep.”

No smile came, but something unclenched inside me. My eyelids grew heavier. Sounds slid deeper; the water’s chime moved farther away, the trees’ whisper closer. The cold biting through the cloak into my back no longer felt like an enemy—more like vigilance. One last time that night my hand rested on my belly. I didn’t ask, didn’t demand. I only said goodbye.

The dark didn’t collapse onto me. It tucked me in, like earth accepting a sown seed. The pain stayed, but it didn’t tear—now it, too, was resting. My wolf sat where the wind should be in my ear, and kept watch. My breathing slowed, and though loss lurked at the edge of every beat, something else found space between them: a thin, stubborn thread that will not let us be torn apart. I didn’t know its name yet. But I knew its weight.

The first quiet, tentative tapping of a bird wasn’t dawn yet—only its promise. I heard it just before I slept. And my body, made of so many rifts, whispered back for the first time: I’m still here.