Chapter 12: What He Actually Sees

Sierra

Kairo found me on the training ground an hour before sunset, the light going soft and gold across the dirt I'd been eating all afternoon.

I didn't hear him arrive. That was the first sign something was different, Kairo never approached quietly. He was a man who filled a room by walking into it, who didn't need to announce himself because his presence did it for him. 

But this time I only noticed him when Fenris straightened abruptly and stepped back, and I turned to find my husband standing at the edge of the ring with an expression I couldn't immediately place.

"That's enough for today," he said. Not to me. To Fenris.

Fenris didn't argue. He inclined his head and left without a word, and Rook followed a half-second later, and then it was just the two of us and the long shadows and my own ragged breathing.

"I wasn't finished," I said, wiping mud from my forearm.

"You've trained every day this week. Twice, some days." He wasn't angry. That was almost worse I could have handled angry. This was something quieter, more careful, like he'd rehearsed the words on the way here and still wasn't sure he'd chosen the right ones. "I want to understand why."

"I told you. I want to be able to defend myself."

"Against what?" He took a step closer, and I made myself hold still instead of retreating. "Sierra, you throw yourself at Fenris like you're trying to prove something, and I've watched you do it long enough to know it isn't really about defense. So I'm asking you plainly. What are you trying to fix?"

The question landed somewhere I wasn't prepared for.

"I'm not trying to fix anything."

"Then why does it look like punishment?"

I didn't have an answer ready, which was dangerous, because the silence stretched long enough that he filled it himself, and what he filled it with wasn't anything close to the truth.

"I've heard the things people used to say about you," he said, quieter now. 

"Before you came here. I know what Glendale called you." His jaw tightened around the words like they cost him something to say out loud. "If some part of you thinks you have to earn a place here by becoming smaller, or harder, or anything other than what you already are — I need you to hear me say this isn't that. You don't have to fight your way into being worth keeping."

I stared at him.

Of all the things I'd braced for suspicion, accusation, the beginning of the conversation where he finally asked why a woman training this obsessively might have secrets worth training for — this wasn't on the list. 

This was somehow harder to hear than an accusation would have been, because an accusation I could have deflected with practiced ease. This was just honest, and I had no defense built for honest.

"Your body isn't something to correct," he said. "I've never once looked at you and thought you needed to be different than you are."

My throat closed around whatever I might have said back. 

Because the truth, the real truth, the one that had put me on this training ground every single day since Fenris first knocked me flat had nothing to do with my body at all, and everything to do with a daughter I hadn't held since the night she was born, a ritual clock I couldn't stop counting down in my head, and the terrible certainty that when the moment finally came to save her, I would need to be strong enough to do it myself, because I couldn't trust anyone else to.

I couldn't tell him any of that. Not without unraveling everything else I'd built to keep her safe.

So I did the only thing I knew how to do. I deflected.

"I like training," I said, which was true, if incomplete. "It gives me something to do besides sitting in rooms being talked about."

Something in his expression flickered, not quite disappointment, not quite disbelief, but close enough to both that I felt the lie sitting between us like something physical.

"All right," he said finally, and I could hear him choosing not to push, choosing to let me keep whatever door I'd just closed. "Then train. But not into the ground. I'd rather have a wife who can fight than one who collapses trying to prove she needs to."

He turned to go, and I watched him walk away instead of saying anything to stop him watched the careful, deliberate way he held his shoulders, like the conversation had cost him something he wasn't ready to name out loud. 

He didn't look back once, all the way to the archway, though I half expected him to.

I stood alone in the ring long after he'd gone, mud drying on my skin, turning his words over and over until they'd worn a groove in me, I didn't know how to close back up. You don't have to fight your way into being worth keeping.

He had no idea what he was actually offering me forgiveness for and I had no idea, standing there in the last of the light, why some small, unguarded part of me wanted so badly to deserve it anyway.