The Word He Never Finished

   Kira pov

 The way I only ever am in the worst dreams.

The cottage is warmer than it has any right to be. I am in the little side room that used to be mine.

 Father’s cough sounds wetter and heavier than it has for days.

His boots scrape across the floorboards. Then an uneven drag, a sudden thump, the sharp clatter of metal hitting stone.

I am on my feet before the second sound finishes.

“Father?”

Only a low, choked noise that does not belong in a living throat.

I push the door open too hard. He is on the floor near the table, one hand pressed to his mouth. Black blood pours between his fingers and spreads across the boards. His eyes find me, wide and already half-gone.

“Help!” “Help! Someone help him!” i cried

No one comes.

I drop to my knees so hard it jars my teeth. My small hands press against his chest, his shoulder, the side of his face. The blood is hot and sticky.

“Please! please stay! Father, look at me”

His mouth opens. Black fluid runs over his lower lip. He forces the air harder.

“Your mother…” The words are broken. “She was… you will be…”

His body jerks. One last push of breath.

“Goddess”

The light leaves his eyes between one blink and the next.

I scream. The sound is high and useless. I shake him. I beg. None of it works.

A shadow moves in the corner of the room.

Bridget stands there, already dressed, arms folded, face unreadable. She has been watching the entire time. She did not call for help. She did not move.

Alexia appears behind her, small and sharp-eyed, taking in the blood and my sobbing form.

Bridget’s voice is soft and final.

“You killed him.”

Alexia’s voice joins at once. “Murderer. She killed her own father.”

I cannot breathe. I cannot stop shaking. The word murderer lands on my skin like a brand.

The cottage dissolves.

The floor becomes cold stone. I am older. The man on the ground is the stranger from the cave. gold eyes, poisoned arrow. Black veins crawl from the wound the same way the black blood crawled from my father’s mouth. History is repeating and I cannot stop it.

“Please don’t leave me”

The words tear out as I jerk upright on the kitchen floor.

My heart slams. Sweat soaks the blanket. The dream is still wrapped around my ribs.

Footsteps. Fast. Coming toward the kitchen.

The door crashes open.

Bridget fills the doorway with a wooden bucket. She swings it and empties the entire contents over my head and chest in one hard arc.

Ice water hits like a physical blow, driving the air from my lungs.

“Wake up, you wretch,” she snarls. “Before I make you lose your life the same way your mother lost hers.”

I gasp and shiver, pushing the soaked blanket away.

Alexia appears following her mother behind, eyes bright with pleasure.

“She was screaming again?” Alexia says. “About not being left.?”

Bridget’s attention stays fixed on me.

“On your feet. Now. The floor will not dry itself.”

I force myself upright. The shift clings cold. I keep my eyes down.

“Fetch the mop or rags. Then the water and eggs. One more sound and you spend the night in the shed. Understand?”

“Yes.”

The word scrapes raw.

Alexia drifts away. Bridget watches me a moment longer with the same stillness from the dream.

“Your father would be ashamed,” she says. “Calling out like a child.”

She turns and leaves. The door shuts.

I stand in the water, shaking.

The dream will not leave.

Father on the floor. Black blood. The word he forced out with the last of his strength

“Goddess” 

and the way Bridget and Alexia had turned the entire death into my crime. Then the cave, the second body, the same helpless panic. Two deaths layered on top of each other until I could no longer tell which blood belonged to which man.

I drag the mop from its corner and begin to work. The water soaks into the old floorboards faster than I can push it toward the door. My hands are clumsy with cold. Every time I bend, the wet shift pulls against my skin and reminds me I am still only half awake.

Outside the single window the sky is the flat gray that comes just before true dawn. No birds yet. Only the low sound of the wind moving through the trees at the edge of the property.the same trees that hide the path to the Whispering Woods and the cave I have not dared return to.

I finished the floor. I wring the rags until my fingers ache. I refill the washing basin from the well, the rope burning my already-raw palms.

 By the time the first real light reaches the kitchen I have set the eggs to boil and started the morning porridge, movements automatic, mind still trapped between the two dying men.

Bridget returns as the porridge thickens. She tastes it, adds salt without comment, and sets three bowls on the table. Only two of them receive a proper portion. 

The third,mine gets the thin remainder at the bottom of the pot.

Alexia slides into her chair and begins to eat with delicate, pleased bites. Bridget sits opposite her. Neither of them looks at me until I have finished serving.

“You will go to the market after the washing,” Bridget says. “The soap is nearly gone and I need thread. Do not linger. Do not speak to anyone longer than necessary. And if you come back with that same haunted look on your face, I will give you something real to be haunted about.”

I nod.

Alexia glances up, spoon halfway to her mouth. “Maybe she was dreaming about the forest again. She always comes back from those woods looking half-dead. Maybe she met a ghost.”

Bridget’s mouth tightens. “There are no ghosts. Only foolish girls who do not know how to keep their mouths shut and their hands busy.”

I eat standing near the wall, the way I always do. The porridge is almost tasteless. My body accepts it because it must. Inside my head the word goddess keeps repeating, soft and unfinished, the way Father said it with blood in his mouth.

What had he been trying to tell me?

What was my mother?

What was I going to become?

The questions sit beside the memory of the man in the cave.

the gold eyes, the grip on my wrist, the scent I still cannot scrub away and refuse to leave.

After the meal I clear the bowls, scrub them, and hang the wet blanket near the stove in the faint hope it will dry before night. Bridget and Alexia move into the main room. Their voices drift through the thin wall in low, satisfied tones. I catch the words “useless” and “should have left her in the woods” and then nothing more.

I step outside with the empty water bucket. The morning air is sharp enough to sting the inside of my nose. I stand for a moment beside the well and let my eyes travel to the dark line of trees in the distance.

The cave is still there.

The man may still be there, or he may be bones by now. I have no way of knowing and no right to find out. Returning would be another crime Bridget could use against me. Staying away feels like a second kind of abandonment.

I lower the bucket, fill it, and haul it up. The rope leaves new lines across my palms. I carry the water inside and set it where it belongs.

The day unfolds in the same narrow pattern it always does: washing, mending, sweeping, fetching, enduring. Alexia finds small reasons to correct me. Bridget finds larger ones. Neither of them mentions the scream or the water again. The silence around the incident is worse than the shouting. It means the punishment has only been postponed.

By late afternoon my body is moving on pure habit. My mind keeps circling the dream. Father’s unfinished sentence. The accusation. The cave. The way both men had looked at me in their last moments as if I were the only solid thing left in a collapsing world.

When the light begins to thin I am sent to gather the last of the eggs from the coop. The hens are quiet. The air smells of dust and feathers. I am reaching for the final egg when a sudden, sharp memory of black blood on floorboards makes my hand jerk. The egg slips and cracks against the wooden ledge.

I stare at the broken shell and the slow seep of yellow and clear liquid, and for one disorienting second it looks like the wrong kind of blood.

“Clumsy as ever.”

Alexia’s voice comes from the doorway of the cottage. She has been watching.

 “Of course she has.”

I clean the mess without answering, gather the remaining eggs, and walk back toward the kitchen. Alexia does not move out of the doorway until the last possible moment, forcing me to turn sideways to pass her. She smiles as I do, the small private smile she saves for moments when she has reminded me of my place.

Inside, Bridget is already lighting the lamp. The smell of hot oil and wick fills the room. She glances at the basket of eggs, then at my face, then back to the lamp.

“You will sleep in the shed tonight,” she says, as if the decision has been waiting all day for the right moment.

 “The kitchen floor is still damp from your theatrics this morning and I will not have you stinking up the house with whatever fever is putting those screams in your mouth. Take the thin blanket. Do not expect a candle.”

Alexia makes a soft sound of approval.

I do not argue. Argument has never changed the outcome. I take the still-damp blanket, the one that was soaked at dawn, and walk out into the gathering dusk.

The shed sits at the edge of the packed dirt yard, its door slightly crooked on the hinges. Inside it smells of old wood, dried herbs, and the faint animal scent of the mice that live in the walls. 

There is a low wooden platform that serves as a bed, a single high window too small for anything larger than a cat, and a heavy bar that Bridget will slide into place once I am inside.

I step in. The door closes behind me. The bar scrapes across the wood with a sound of finality.

Darkness settles quickly. I wrap the damp blanket around my shoulders and sit with my back against the wall, knees drawn up, the same posture I had in the dream when I was small and still believed someone might come if I called loudly enough.

“No one is coming.”

Outside, the wind moves through the trees. Somewhere farther off a night bird calls once and falls silent. I close my eyes and try not to see black blood or gold eyes or the shape of my father’s mouth forming the single word he died trying to finish.

Goddess.

The word sits in the dark with me, unfinished and heavy, while the bar on the other side of the door remains firmly in place and the cold of the shed slowly works its way into my bones.

I do not sleep for a long time.

When I finally drift, it is not into rest. It is back toward the edge of the same nightmare, where two dying men look at me with the same desperate eyes, and the only person watching from the corner is Bridget, waiting to decide which of us will be blamed when the last breath leaves.

 The bar stays locked. The word “goddess”  sits in the dark with me like a pulse.