Shattered Bonds A Second Chance Mate (by Yui) novel Chapter 231

Chapter 231

Still Francesco Point of view

The dream refuses to end. It’s like the challenges me, because I know the is watching

It colls around my throat, a silk ribbon that tightens each time I pull for air. Shadow, salt, a woman’s letter braided with a woman’s scream–two notes bent into one until I can’t tell which belongs to the past and which belongs to me.

I wake already moving, hand at my neck, naik digging in as if I could tear the ribbon free. The room is blue with near–daws, the kind of hype that makes a man feel transparent. Beside me, the bollow where Filene’s warmth was an hour ago will holds her shape. The impression of her shoulder. The dent of her hip. I press my palm there us the outline fits my hand and the panic sides back into the blind places

It doesn’t stay. It never stays

The voice comes on the inhale, like prayer turned inside out

Leave her

Soft as first snow. Gd as tide

I say nothing. Words give it bones. I swing my legs to the floor and stand into the ache like a soldier stands into rain. T mark beneath my collarbone in awake again–beat kosening into pulte, pulse loosening into hurr. It has learned my rhythms the way a hunter learns a deer path. It knows when I am empty enough to fill.

I dress without sound. Linen Leather Bandage wrapped around my knuckles though I haven’t cut them yet. Habit is a kind of mercy. I buckle the knife at my spine though I won’t draw it. The training yard beyond the east hall is black with night, the lamps along the wall are a dotted line of amber–beads on a rosary. Court the beads, make a promise, break it gently when you must

I step into the cold and the cold steps into me. Breath fogs then vanishes Boots on stone–three, four, five–stop.byer smell of old rope, new straw, iron. Beneath it a thinner note, rosemary, wet from last evening mist. Her hands in the garden. Her laugh when dirt found her cheek. I close my eyes and for a moment the ribbon loosens

“You know how it ends, the voice says, almost tender. You are Lycaon. You always choose yourself!

“I chose the fire,” I answer, and my breath maketh cloud, a pale animal that lopes away.

It laughs without sound. A ripple across a dry lakebed. You chose to live. That is the shape of your love?

I look at the sand–pit and think of the first time I was given to it. Father’s voice a low god behind me. Franco to my left, smiling with all his teeth, the smile of a boy who had already put his hand on the door of the room where men plan their own apotheos. The pit swallowed us both. I learned to make my body a wall. Franco learned to make his a mirror. He moved like me until he didn’t have to. I move now to move away from that memory. Into the sand. Barefoot, as the old masters required. The grains are ice, then simply themselves.

I raise my hands. The air raises its hands back. We enter

The first hour I keep it clean. Breath in fours, strike in threes–left, right, right; weight on the ball, slide, pivot. The straw posts thud like doors shut by careful servants. Shoulders warm then burn. Hip flexor sings that thin high note that only fighter know, the one that means you’ve asked for everything and the tendon still gave you more. I welcome the song. Pain is a language I speak without accent. It crowds out the other music.

But hunger creeps. Not mine.

The hum under the mark turns to a moth beating at glass. Each strike draws it nearer. Each drop of sweat salts whatever lives in the old wound and I can hear the ocean again, inside bone. This time it is not the mermaid’s heart; it is the echo that

heart left behind. The tide’s memory of the vessel it once was.

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12:28 Wed, 15 Oct

Chapter 231

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‘Imagine it, the voice whispers, honey over iron. ‘Imagine not waking with your hands around her throat. Imagine never tasting the metals of her blood. Imagine silence!

I drive my fist into the post until straw bursts like a small gold storm. Silence is the one luxury I have never owned. Even in the forest, even under snow, my head is a cathedral of echoes. I know how to pray in them. I will pray now.

I change the form. Low stances, slow. The sequence that was taught to me by a man with one eye and too many winters- grounding work, the art of speaking to gravity in her own voice. Heel digs, toe floats, spine hanging from the back of the skull like a pendulum. I once mocked this. I once said the only prayer a body needs is the one it says to the ground when it fails, and the ground returns nothing. I have fewer certainties now, and that is good. The certain are the most dangerous.

I stay with the form until my breath strings into a rope I can hold. Until the hum in my chest lowers by a half–tone. Until my hands remember they are hands, not instruments.

Then I run.

The track around the yard is dirt gone to dark sugar. The first lap is the hardest because the body still believes in reason. The second is easier because reason has learned she is no help here. By the fifth, the world has narrowed to the hinge of my knee and the place where my heel meets earth and says again. The voice tries to climb into the rhythm like ivy and I strip it away with counting. Seven four time. Five four. No pattern large enough for it to nest in. The trick is in not making a home for what wants to live inside you.

After I run I climb the wall. The stones are wet; the lichen doesn’t care that I am a king. It is gentle and slick and will kill me if I forget it is older than any crown. My fingers find the swallow–nests that men before me carved for their own coura e When I pull myself onto the parapet the wind steals whatever heat I have left. The trees beyond the border are black la e Something moves in them and it is only a fox. I let that be enough.

This is when the headache arrives–the one with light in it. It pushes at the backs of my eyes like a command. I rub at my temple with the heel of my hand until my skull creaks back into a shape I know. Sometimes I would ask Lira for the tea that tastes like the inside of a copper pot. Tonight I will not. The ache has its own use: it keeps me honest. As long as I can feel what hurts, I can find where I end and the old wound begins.

I go back down and into the armory. No lamp. The moon makes shy shapes of blade and haft. I move by memory. I finds my palm with the intimacy of a lover who has been loyal through exiles. The wood is scarred in my places. I spinat once and the air makes its small startled noise. There. Now there is a line between me and what would cross me. I accept the invitation and begin.

The staff work forces breath to obey. Anything that asks breathing to be careful reduces the space where teeth can speak. The first set is the river–slow, then many. The second is the hinge–everything a door and I am the doorframe. The third is simply cruelty. To the body, not to the world. I touch the old wound in my thigh and feed it the repetition until it stops asking for pity. The rhythm deepens. The hum in my chest tries to join it and I decide to let it. A man can play music with a train approaching behind him if he knows the track and trusts his timing. I have not died on tracks yet.

The staff blurs. The headaches dulls. The yard moves around me and then there is nothing but the circle of my hands and the tunnel where the next breath waits to be asked.

Then the door opens.

Not the real door–the other one. The one that is the back of my eyes when sleep drags me down like a river that is too tired to be gentle. I know this corridor. The bricks shine with damp. There is no torch smoke and yet the ceiling remembers it. I walk it barefoot and the stone is warm, which is how I know it lies.

‘Francesco.

The voice is not the smoke–velvet this time. It has become particular. It wears my father’s posture, my brother’s grin, my own mouth on nights I hated myself and made that hatred elegant. I do not look. Looking is a kind of bow.

‘Do you want it to be you? Or do you want it to be the curse?‘ the voice asks, reasonable as a steward. ‘If it’s the curse, you are noble. If it’s you….

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