Page 139 of Bone Year

I press my face into his shoulder and his shirt is rough against my cheek and warm from him, and I can hear his heartbeat under my ear, slow and steady, slower than mine, a vampire’s heart at rest. I stay where I am with my face against his shoulder and my fingers gripping a fistful of his shirt. His thumb has started moving in a slow line at the back of my neck, under my hair, so light I would have missed it if I hadn’t been so still.

I think about how much of him is touching me.

His chest. His arm across my back. His hand at the back of my head. His other hand at my neck.

If anyone had told me yesterday that Draven Alucard would be holding me through a crying fit at the end of a terrible day, I would have laughed in their face.

My face heats when I remember my dream, and I push off his shoulder and settle back under the covers, wiping my face clean.

Poppy appears and presses her fluffy body between us, rolling onto her back to look up at the two of us. Draven chuckles, and I can’t help smiling, because she’s ridiculous and adorable, and I don’t think I could have cut today without her. Professor Nestor was right. I’m training to be a healer, and I was blessed with a second pair of hands.

“Why Poppy?” Draven asks. I turn onto my side so we’re facing each other.

“I buried my father behind our home in a field of poppies.”

Chapter Twenty-Nine

“The body keeps secrets the mind has not agreed to.”

— Professor Cane, Fracture and Form

Draven’s arm is across my waist when I wake up.

I don’t remember falling asleep after Poppy crawled between us. She’s gone now, resting within me, and the fire must have burned out, because a cold has crept back into the room through the cracked window above us. Draven’s chest is warm and hard against my back, and his hand is splayed open against my stomach where my top has shifted up in the night.

I keep my eyes closed.

If I move, he wakes. If he wakes, he’s going to pull back, and the moment will end before either of us decides whether we wanted it to. Last night, I told this man things I haven’t told anyone, and he held me through the worst of it, and somewhere in the dark I forgot for a few hours that I don’t entirely trust him and that he’s a bit of an asshole.

I haven’t forgotten this morning.

He’s the only person at this academy who keeps appearing in places I don’t expect him to be. He vanishes for stretches, and then he’s there again randomly in a dark alley, watching me. He has secrets with the headmaster, and he has friends whose company I wouldn’t keep, and one of those friends is likely a murderer. I can’t with any certainty say which side of any of that Draven is even on.

What I can say is that he carried me to my room when I was drunk, and he brought me Nella’s journal when he didn’t have to. He trusted me to cut the corruption from his wing yesterday, not that he had much of a choice. He saved a man’s life yesterday and admitted to being the prince, to worrying about his soul, to family drama I never expected him to share with anyone, much less me.

This man is such a conundrum. He acts like he hates me, like I’m a despicable human who doesn’t belong, and then he protects me, and now he’s holding me in bed. And I poured part of my soul out to him last night, though I can blame that on the alcohol.

These are all things I need to think about later when I’m not pinned under a vampire prince’s arm in a chapel bed pretending to be asleep.

His breath is even at the back of my neck, and I start to count it. Slower than mine. Around the eighth breath, he shifts, registering where his hand is.

His hand draws back across my stomach with careful slowness in an attempt not to wake me. I keep my breathing steady and my eyes closed as I feel him sit up and slip off the edge of the bed and then out the door into the nave.

I roll onto my back and stare up at the ceiling. My head hurts from a night of drinking, and I press my hands over my eyes and forehead. My eyes feel puffy from crying, and the memory of that night with my father floods my mind again.

My throat closes without warning. One moment I’m fine, and the next there’s a fist wrapped around my windpipe, squeezing. The burning spreads down into my chest and settles behind my ribs like something alive, something with teeth. I inhale through my nose and feel my eyes start to well. I swallow hard, trying to shove the thoughts back into the locked box where I keep them.

I can’t let myself think of the memories again. The good ones hurt worse than the bad ones somehow. It’s easier to pretend. To remember him healthy and whole, humming off-key while he made breakfast, his reading glasses perpetually crooked on his nose. To let myself believe that if I went home tomorrow, he’d be standing in the doorway of the clinic, wiping his hands on that old brown apron, calling me in for dinner like nothing ever changed.

I’m a coward.

The thought of letting the truth settle over me completely, of accepting that he’s gone, really gone, is so suffocating I cannot bear it. Losing someone you love is not a wound that heals with time. It is an amputation. It’s a piece of yourself carved out and buried in the ground with them. And knowing they’ll be gone forever. For all of eternity. For as long as your life stretches on, you’ll never see that person again. Never hear their voice when they call your name. Never hear them yell at you for throwing rocks at the neighbor’s fence again. Never feel their steady hands guiding yours as they teach you how to stitch a wound properly, patient even when you mess up for the tenth time. Never feel the weight of his hand on your head when you’ve done something right. The pride in his eyes that said more than words ever could.

Knowing gone means forever.

It’s the most unbearable, suffocating, throat-wrenching pain I’ve ever known. And I can’t let it consume me. If I let it in, even for a moment, it’ll swallow me whole, and I’ll drown in it.

After last night, after reliving everything and telling Draven what happened, it feels so fresh in my mind again. Like in the day-to-day I can pretend it never happened, but when I let the thoughts in, it all comes rushing back.