Genesis Lost - Books 1 - 6, page 83
“My sister thinks people will turn against Rowan for staying with a tr… um… with —”
“With a traitor,” I whispered, the rough taste of iron rubbing against my tongue.
“With his wife,” Adair said. “She thinks there might be a rebellion which Rowan couldn’t fight off.”
“Might?” Hazel sneered, her gaze bouncing from place to place. “The entire village will turn on him, and there’s no telling what kind of man will replace him. All those new laws and… everything will be like it was before. The rapes. The assaults. The… the…”
“Does that mean we won’t be safe here anymore?” Ruth asked, digging her fingers deeper into the pillow, pulling it against her chest. “Nobody would touch me, right? Right?”
“You’re freaking her out, Hazel.” Adair walked over to Ruth, kneeled down in front of her and caught her eyes. “I promised I’ll protect you, and nothing will change that. Nobody will touch you as long as I live.”
Hazel crossed her arms in front of her chest and spun around. “Stop making her promises you can’t keep.”
“Shit, Hazel. What is it with you?” Adair asked and stared at his sister. “It’s not like everyone here is against it. I don’t give a shit about whom Rowan is married to. I got his back, and so does River, Oriel, Uncle Peter —”
“Keep going dear brother,” Hazel said, raising an eyebrow in a I-dare-you kind of way. “Think you’ll be able to count out ten men? Fifteen, maybe? You are stupid if you believe Rowan will win this.”
“It’s not gonna come to that,” Adair’s voice wavered as if unconvinced of his own statement.
My heart sunk deeper and deeper, bottoming out somewhere near my guts. I was motionless as if embedded in thick air and an overbearing feeling of a terrible fate. Barely hanging on to the edge of my reasoning. I can’t break his heart again.
“I only hope he will come to his senses and change his mind,” she said.
Panic pushed inside my ribcage. So far, I hadn’t considered that he might change his mind. No… he wouldn’t. I was sure.
Hazel studied me with her lips pressed together like plywood, concern seeping from the wrinkles around her mouth. No, not concern. Much stronger than that. Panic, almost. “Did it ever cross your mind that things might have been better if you didn’t come back?”
Is this fair, her eyes added as an unspoken question, dragging your own Clan back into chaos?
I had no answer.
“Did you leave Rose with Autumn?” Adair asked. “I better walk you back now, but we can swing by at the cabin and pick her up on the way.”
I shook my head, more at myself than his question. “No. I’d like to go to the village first and see Rowan. He went to see Max earlier, but should be back at the longhouse now.”
He gave me a quick nod and disappeared inside once more, leaving us women behind with a mix of fears and doubts. Hazel had once more turned away, her face almost as pale as the snow she overlooked through the windows. Ruth remained hunched over the pillow.
“Ready when you are,” Adair said, stepping back into the sunroom and handing me my coat.
I left without saying another word, telling the concerned voices in my head to shut the fuck up. Rowan would have told me if he wasn’t certain. And even if people would rebel against him, he’d take care of it. Some of our best men supported him. Adair said so himself.
So why the hell did my stomach feel as if I’d jumped off a cliff?
We left the home and headed south-east toward the village, trampling footprints two feet deep into the snow. The white blanket of winter reminded me a whole lot of my mind, wiped blank, leaving me disoriented and wary.
“I didn’t need you to walk me down here,” I said as we approached the village where salted fish hung strung on a line to dry with the freeze.
“Yeah, it’s pretty safe for everyone now…” he said, the way his thoughts stole the momentum of his voice, making it clear there was more. Safe for everyone. Except me.
Rowan’s eyes, somehow a darker gray than just a day ago, found mine the moment I stepped into the longhouse. I gave him a reassuring smile. A we-can-do-this smile.
His gaze flinched away from me, flitting about the room without returning.
“What are you doing here?” he mumbled, fidgeting through a stack of old maps on the table in front of him.
“Wanted to stop by and say hi before I pick up Rose and go back home.” And talk. Reassure each other.
“It’s awfully nice of Adair to bring you here, but it isn’t his job to play your guard. His skills are better applied somewhere else.” His eyes remained locked on the paper in front of him, waving me over with his hand. “I need your input here.”
I took a step toward him, his rumbling voice suspending my foot inches above the ground. “Not you. Adair.”
“Oh…” I said, glancing over my shoulder at Adair who hurried to his chieftain’s side.
“We received a recorded message from the council,” Rowan said, his voice raspy. “Said they prosecuted pastor William, Max’s dad, as a conspirator and public enemy. They gave us some coordinates, around twenty-three miles west of their northern gate.”
“To do what?” Adair asked.
Rowan sucked in his cheek and squinted his eyes at one map, his finger tapping mindlessly against the brittle paper. “That’s what I’m trying to figure out here. Maybe they want us to come to get him.”
“Yeah… I don’t think so. Maybe it’s a trap,” Adair said, “and they’re trying to get us.”
“Damn right.”
Adair took a few steps away from the table and rubbed the back of his neck. “Did they say anything else? Or give a time and date?”
“Nothing.”
“Something doesn’t feel right about this.” Adair returned to the table and leaned over the maps, his palms firmly pressed against the wood. “You don’t just give fucking coordinates and don’t specify a time or date. By the time we get there, someone from the Ash Zones might have been quicker. Or a bear. Or a cougar. I say we send three men first thing tomorrow morning.”
A shadow squirmed over Rowan’s already gloomy face. “Not a chance. I can’t spare a single man. Not as things are right now.”
His eyes came looking for mine from a lowered head. They locked for a fraction of a second.
I gave him a reassuring nod.
No nod came back.
He wasn’t asking for reassurance, turning my heartbeat into a stutter inside my ears at the realization of it. No, those sorrow-filled craters across his forehead told me just how terrible things were.
“We will send two of the younger scouts,” he said, tracing his finger across pale-green ink. “Give them two of our rangefinder binoculars and have one approach from the north, the other from the north-west. If this forest here is still standing, it should give them enough cover to go undetected. We need to know what’s waiting for us before we go in.”
Adair carefully folded the map back into a neat rectangle and pinched it underneath his arm. “Consider it done. I’ll brief them right now.”
He gave me a nod and rushed out the longhouse, leaving me behind feeling like extra luggage nobody cared to claim. But I wouldn’t let this deter me. I ran once when things got tough. Never again.
“Did you tell Max?”
“Not yet,” Rowan said, his head dropping further. “No need to upset him when we don’t even know yet what we’re dealing with. I want some details on this area first.”
I walked up to Rowan and let my hand glide over his strong shoulder and down his arm, ignoring how his muscles tensed underneath his sweater. “I’m sure everything’s gonna be okay.”
“Sure you do.” He pulled his arm away, letting the cold of the room penetrate the skin of my palm. “You think everything’s gonna be perfect. Well, guess what? It will not be okay, and it sure as hell won’t be fucking perfect.”
A quake rumbled through my knees.
I grabbed for the edge of the table and sturdied myself against the wood. Something’s happened. Did he change his mind?
“Look, if anyone can take care of this situation, it’s you. You are a great chieftain, Rowan. And I’m here with you. Just tell me how I can support you. What can I do to help?”
“Support?” he asked, his voice a little too bright, a little too… sarcastic. “The last time I needed your help and support you took off and disappeared for a year without saying a word.”
What he said hit me in the face like a concrete block, turning me dizzy and disoriented. He is just tense. He is overworked. He is in a tight spot.
He is… he is… he is…
My inner voice turned into a dying echo, disappearing somewhere behind a wall of sense. He must have changed his mind. Why else would he push me away like that?
I pressed my behind against the table and inched closer to him, letting the beard on his cheek bunch up inside my hand. He let out a deep sigh, his throat almost too narrow for all to fit through. For a moment, he closed his eyes as if hiding something from me behind his lids. What it was I couldn’t tell. Did he take on more than he could handle by bringing me back? By staying with me?
Whatever it was added another concrete block, stacking itself between us like a solid wall.
I searched for my inner voice. Not the one that talked sense. The one that went against all the odds, because I loved this man with every pump of my heart. I found it whispering a gentle I love you, fading quicker than the closeness between me and my husband, who began to turn his face away from me.
I took a deep breath. “Why are you like this? Why are you pushing me away—”
“Everything’s either broken or fucking falling apart.” His face hardened, and my heart turned to stone. “I think you’re better off without me, Darya. There’s no god damn fixing for us.”
Twenty-Three
Rowan
“I think you’re better off without me, Darya. There’s no god damn fixing for us,” I said.
Because I am not worth it. I am not worth it.
The words replayed inside my head, making me flinch away from the warm hand of the woman I loved so damn much.
“What happened?” Darya asked, the floorboards creaking underneath our shifting weights, swaying with nowhere to go. There was no escaping this.
“Everything happened. Max’s dad, the Districts, the rebellion… fucking everything.”
“That’s why you’re pushing me away?”
No, I’m pushing you away because I am a fucking loser. A no-good, infertile joke of a husband. “There’s no room for us in this mess, Darya.”
I had said it sharp and to the point, rebuilding that wall I had hid behind for years. How could I have told her about Max? How could she even want someone like me?
She stood there, utterly clueless about what a failure I was. For years I thought it might be me. But now I carried the truth around my wrist, a big, fat holograph about how I let her down as a husband. As a man.
“B-but I love you,” she said.
Her trembling lips made my little, pathetic world twist all around. Of all the mistakes she made, loving me was the worst of them. The one I wouldn’t forgive her.
The thud of each heartbeat dulled inside my ears as if my thinking-brain had chained it with a throttle. Darya and Rose were worth fighting for. Dying for. But I was not, so how would I possibly put them in this much danger?
“Some men started conspiring against me,” I said, stacking my wall higher, using everything I found as concrete blocks — except for the truth. It didn’t want her to know just what a broken bastard she had married.
She stood there for a long while, stiff tendons lining her neck. The edge of her sole ran along the popped nail on one of the floorboards. Then she looked up at me, her beautiful green eyes making every single muscle inside my body clench. “But what about Adair? River? You have the support of some of our best men, and they will fight for you —”
“There, you said it. I have the support of some of the best man,” I said and turned my burning eyes away from her. “The rest of the best men isn’t happy at all about how I handled this entire District mess. Shit. They might be right for all I know. Always told you I’m not chieftain material.”
The thud of my heartbeat dulled some more, threatening a near-stop. In my mind, I saw myself killing every single motherfucker who wanted to hurt my family. Stab a knife between the ribs and puncture their lungs. Put a bullet in their stomach and watch them bleed out. I was sure I might pull it off, but reminding myself of the danger calmed the shame raging inside me.
She took a step toward me and clasped her hands around my arm like to the edge of a cliff. My chest constricted to a point I feared another breath might burst my ribcage. If she’d only known I wasn’t the edge. I was the fucking crater beneath her.
“I refuse to give up on us again,” she said, not a single tremble in her voice.
I wouldn’t let her sacrifice her own and Rose’s safety for me, but it didn’t surprise me how she insisted. Because she had no fucking idea what a let-down I was. There would never be a sibling for Rose, and there sure as hell wouldn’t be a male heir to strengthen my claim.
I have to let her go.
“What if we find proof that they took the things I said on video out of context?” she asked, a little less convinced now, a bit more insecure. “Make them see I’m not a traitor?”
“How? They prosecuted the only contact we had on the inside. He might be dead already for all we know.”
I walked over to the fire pit in the center of the longhouse and threw two fresh logs onto the embers. But no fire might drive out the cold I expected to move in next.
“You can stay at the cabin together with Rose,” I said. “As of right now, nobody believes the rumor that she isn’t mine. They all figured she was conceived before you ran away. Leaving with her would cause —”
“Suspicion,” she said.
“That, and it will give those who are plotting against me higher ground. I wouldn’t hold you back if you wanted to leave with her but… I… I want you to stay here. Where I can still make sure you have everything you need. We just can’t be…”
“Can’t be married,” she said, because I wasn’t man enough for many things, including spelling this out.
“I’ll stay at the longhouse for a while until River gets around to fixing the old brick house by the black walnut tree.”
Long silence paralyzed the room.
If I would have turned around, chances were she stood there with a pain-lined face. Holding her breath because even the tiniest movement of her chest might have split her heart. And I would have been the one who broke it.
Stiff but gentle, a lightweight hand settled on my shoulder. Conflict gnawed on my insides, curling my stature inside her palm. I wanted to take her into my arms. Wrap them around her. Protect her from whatever tried to pry between us — including me.
“Let’s all go away from here.” She said it too quickly. There was no place to go to for us, and she knew it. I shook my head, saying no inside my head, though I’m not sure if it ever made it past my lips.
Her voice sounded once more from behind me, a bit more frantic this time. “I don’t care if this is dangerous. Nothing out here is ever safe, anyway. We can fight off a rebellion, Rowan. Together.”
Shit. My arms trembled, probably because they wanted to grab her and pull her as close to me as possible. Maybe we could fight it, but I didn’t want her to take the risk. Would she even make such a foolish suggestion if she knew what Max told me?
I turned around, my chest rubbing against her arm, standing closer to her now than ex-lovers ever should. She gazed up at me with a fading sparkle of hope hanging at the corners of her eyes. As if I was the only man on this planet. Glorified into shame.
“No,” I said, keeping the you wouldn’t look at me like that if you understood to myself.
I wasted an entire year of my life blaming her for what happened. Telling myself, she ruined us. Broke my heart. I was so fucking stupid. The culprit lived in the mirror.
I spent my entire marriage ignoring the obvious. Because I was so fucking scared it might be me. Scared she’d leave me if she found out. She didn’t run away. I made her fucking run — but not far enough. The only thing left for me to do was fix it. Fix it for good.
“We both know this was a lost cause from the start, right?” I looked deep into her tear-filled eyes as if I expected her to nod. Secretly hoping she wouldn’t because I was fucking selfish like that. “We tried. And it was good. But it just isn’t going to happen. Things have changed since you left. I am chieftain now, and I need to act in the best interest of everyone. Including you. And Rose.”
“I can’t believe this,” she said, her lips twitching as if her filter wasn’t big enough for all those words sitting on her tongue. “When we had sex. When we made love to each other in the tent, I was a traitor, right?”
“Yeah, but —”
“And when you kissed me today in the morning and told me you missed waking up next to me… wasn’t I a traitor then?”
“It’s difficult to —”
She sucked in several quick breaths, her hands hanging stiff and fisted by her side. “It’s not difficult. It’s fucking stupid. What happened from the moment you left the cabin this morning, to now? When we woke up, you didn’t want me to leave, and now you’re trying to… you’re pushing me away.”
“I’m not pushing you away,” I barked, a weird, bitter taste spreading across my gums as if my words were a lie. But I wasn’t lying. I wanted to keep her safe is all. Yeah, that was it. “It’s dangerous, Darya. And I couldn’t forgive myself if anything happened to you or Rose.”
“Do you still love me?” it blurted out of her as if she didn’t listen shit to what I just said.
“I… what?”
“Do you love me?”
Fuck yeah, I love you. Love you more than my life.
“Darya, you are a mother now.” I took a step away from her, inch by inch killing myself from the inside out. “And I am a chieftain. Love has no place when our decisions impact the lives of others.”
