Page 9 of Roar of the Wild

That promise I made myself on that cold hillside, over and over, until it hardened into something I could stand on:Still be here. However small they make you tomorrow, still be here when he comes.

"They're going to sell us," she said, stating it as flatly as she must once have read Nathan his morning diary. Her voice had gone hoarse over the days of the march. "Down there, tomorrow, in front of all of them. That's what all this has been for."

"I think so." There was no kindness in pretending otherwise, and Megan had never been a woman you could comfort with a lie; she'd built a career on reading the truth off people who'd rather she didn't. "Whatever's down there, it's big, and it's settled, and Karik's brought us a long way to trade. Men like him don't march goods five days for nothing."

She was quiet a moment, staring down at the fires. In the low light the last of her London polish had finally gone, the woman beside me had a fortnight of grime worked into the creases of her knuckles and her hair scraped back with a strip of hide and a hollow under her cheekbones that hadn't been there when we broke camp; she looked younger like this. She looked, for the first time in the two years I'd known her, like someone I might have been friends with in another life, before Nathan, before all of it.

"Can I ask you something?" I said.

"You're going to anyway."

"Why did you say yes to him?" The question escaped before I could stop it, the one I'd carried since the Savoy. "You knew what he was doing to me. You'd watched it happen, and you still said yes. Why?"

I braced for the answer I'd built in my head over two numb years: because she'd wanted him, because she'd engineered it, because the perfect PA had simply seen a better position open up and taken it as she took everything, coolly and without a backward glance. I'd needed her to be that, I think. It's easier to hate a woman who chose to hurt you than to sit with the possibility that you were both just weather in someone else's storm.

She didn't give me the answer I'd built; she gave me a worse one, because it was true.

"I didn't know he was going to do it like that," she said, and her voice cracked down the middle. "I swear to you, Ellie, on anything you like, I knew he meant to take me instead of you. He'd told me weeks before. I'm not going to insult you by pretending I was innocent, because I wasn't, I said yes to being his mate knowing it meant you'd be set aside. That's mine to carry and I carry it. But I thought he'd do it quietly and in private. Some cold little conversation in a solicitor's office, as he ended everything. I never dreamed he'd... " She stopped, pressed the back of her wrist to her mouth. "He rejected you in front of five hundred people at the Winter Ball. Broke a fated bond in public, like it was a business announcement. I stood there in that blue coat and watched your face and I understood, right then, exactly what I'd agreed to be mate to. And it was too late. The bond had already taken. You can't un-know a person once you've seen them do a thing like that, and you can't un-bond either, more's the pity."

I sat very still while the fire popped between us. Somewhere below, a burst of laughter drifted up from the settlement, warm with a language I couldn't parse and utterly indifferent to the two of us on the cold shoulder of the hill.

Two years I'd wanted her to say something I could use against her. And here she was handing me the thing I'd wanted least: not a villain's confession, but a mirror. She'd been sold the same story I had, that Nathan Cole was a prize, that being chosen by him was a woman's good fortune, that fate had done her a kindness. She'd just been on the winning side of it, right up until she wasn't, right up until she watched him do to me in public what he'd one day be entirely capable of doing to her.

"I confronted him," she said, lower now. "Afterward, that same night. I told him it was cruel and cowardly and that whateverI'd thought I was signing up for, it wasn't that. He looked at me as if I were hysterical. Said the public setting was deliberate, that a clean, witnessed break left no ambiguity, no room for you to make trouble later." Her mouth twisted around the memory. "Efficientwas the word he used for it. He'd humiliated you in front of everyone we knew, and he called it efficient, and I understood I'd bound myself for life to a man who genuinely could not tell the difference between efficient and monstrous."

"Oh, Megan." I didn't know what else to say. All the clever cruel things I'd rehearsed had turned to sand.

"I'm not asking you to forgive me," she said quickly, retreating behind the briskness I knew. "I know what I did. But if we're being sold to prehistoric strangers in the morning, you should at least have the facts first. You deserved the truth. Nobody in our world ever seemed prepared to give it to you."

Then certainty settled all the way through me, closing the final sliver of doubt.

Because a woman being handed to strangers in the morning doesn't waste her last private hour clearing an old debt for her own sake. She does it for what comes after her. She does it because she's suddenly, ferociously aware of consequences, of the shape her choices will leave behind, of a small accounting that has to be squared before, in case, and I'd sat at enough deathbeds and blessed enough frightened new mothers in my old life to know the particular gravity that comes over a woman when she's stopped thinking only of herself.

I looked at her hand, resting low against her belly. She wasn't even aware she was doing it.

"How far along are you?" I asked, as gently as I knew how, the soft careful question you put to a thing you already know and need to hear said aloud anyway.

Megan went absolutely still. Every muscle in her locked. Her eyes came up to mine, huge and terrified in the firelight, and fora second I watched her decide whether to deny it, watched the old reflex to control the information, to manage, to give nothing away, fight against how tired she was and how alone and how very far from anywhere safe.

"You can't tell anyone," she whispered. "Ellie, please, you can't, not Nathan, not... Not anyone..."

"I won't." I said it like the vow it was. "Not Nathan. Not anyone. You have my word, and I won't break it."

Something she'd been holding up alone for weeks gave way then, and she cried at last, silently, in the way you learn when tears are dangerous, her shoulders shaking, her breath coming in tiny ragged pulls. "Seven weeks," she got out; "Near enough, I worked it out the only way there is, counting back. He doesn't know a thing about it, and I can't be the one to tell him. You of all people know what he is, and I keep thinking, a baby, in this, with him... " She pressed both hands over her mouth; "I don't know what I'm going to do."

I did the only thing there was to do. I put my arm around her and pulled her in, and she came, this woman I'd hated with a clean unwavering hatred for two years. She put her filthy tear-wet face against my shoulder and let me hold her while she shook.

"You're not doing it alone," I said into her hair. "Whatever happens down there tomorrow, whatever this is, you're not carrying it by yourself anymore, because I've got you now. I've had my eye on you for a fortnight, you daft cow. Why do you think I've been slipping you the good bits off the stone?"

A sound came out of her that was half sob and half startled laugh. "I thought you'd worked out I was pregnant and were trying to be, I don't know, a better person than me."

"Oh, I'm a much better person than you," I said. "That was never in question."

She laughed properly then, a wet cracked sound with something real underneath it, and a knot I had not known I still carried came loose. Two years of poison drained out of me on that cold hillside and left behind a strange light feeling I didn't fully trust yet. Forgiveness, maybe, or something adjacent to it. Whatever it was, it was warmer than the hatred had ever been, and I understood, sitting there with Nathan's pregnant mate weeping quietly against my shoulder, both of us cargo, both of us waiting to be sold at first light, that he'd taken almost everything from both of us, and left us, without meaning to, each other.

* * *

Under my ribs, while I held her, the borrowed weight lay quiet and almost warm, and I registered it only as a headache lifting, by the sudden absence of a pain you'd stopped registering as pain. There was no lurch this time, no curdled ache, only that low banked steadiness that seemed to come over it whenever I was doing what I was apparently for, whenever I turned whatever I had toward someone who needed it.