Page 32 of Beyond the Cottage

“What, Lab Coat?”

Straightening, he attempted to get his face under control. “I’d like to tell you again how sorry I am. It’s not enough, I know, and I don’t imagine you care, but I…” He cleared his throat. “I don’t know. I just needed you to hear it again.”

She plucked a medical journal off a table and flipped through it. “Right. Do you have anything to read that isn’t mind-numbing? Or better yet, do you have any booze?”

“I don’t expect you to forgive me, but can you please saysomething? I’d rather you eviscerate me than pretend this doesn’t matter!”

She tossed the journal aside and approached him. “That’s the thing. This doesn’t matter.Youdon’t matter. If you want to hear the truth, I pretty much forgot about you within days of escaping the cottage.” She shrugged and added, “I guess that’s why I didn’t recognize you.”

He went still, eyes stricken. “…I don’t believe that. I understand why you hate me now, but you won’t convince me you didn’t care before.”

“Believe me or don’t, I couldn’t give less of a shit. But ask yourself this. Why do you think I never said goodbye?”

He inhaled sharply. His eyes wavered and closed. When he opened them, they were vacant.

“I see.” He straightened and clasped his hands behind his back. “You said you’d like something to eat. I’ll leave a tray beside the bathwater. Do you need anything else?”

“My boots. Clean clothes, too.”

“In the dresser, there’s—”

“I won’t wear anything that belongs to you. Get something from Seven or one of the other pixies.”

Three heartbeats passed before he stiffly nodded and turned. When he finally left, she locked the door and pressed her back to it, sliding until she hit the floor.

Chapter 12

Ansel’s feet carried him through the halls by muscle memory alone. He kept his unfocused eyes trained ahead, willing the prison’s shadows to devour him whole.

He'd found Gretta.

And she hated him.

She truly hated him, and he couldn’t undo it. More than that, he deserved it. His transgressions would be despicable in any context, but committing them against her, in the way she most feared…

He let out a roar and slammed his fist into a door. The skin on his knuckles broke, leaving a bloody smear on the wood, and he flexed his damaged hand. The physical pain didn’t register against the constricting in his chest.

He could hardly breathe for what he’d done to her. If there was some way to go back in time, he’d knock the teeth out of his head and let her cut out his heart with the dagger he’d stolen. But there was no going back.

Hell, he ought to embrace what he was feeling, treating it as penance, the only justice he could offer her.

And he would. Gretta detested him now, and he accepted it.

…But what about before? Had she meant it when she said she never cared about him? He wanted to believe she’d lied to hurt him, that this miserable, fucked up situation wasn’t a reflection of their past. Every cell in his body rebelled against the idea that their former bond had been one of mere utility for her.

Because to him, she’d been everything.

He nearly hadn’t survived the cottage before Gretta came. He’d spent two years alone with the Eater, wasting away, barely enduring the brief visits from the children she lured with her enchanted song. The details of what happened to the others were mostly blank places in his memory, but his skin still shriveled when he pictured their tear-stained faces.

As far as Ansel knew, he was the first one the old witch hadn’t consumed. After luring him, she kept him as a houseboy, delegating the tasks she no longer had strength for. As she aged further, Ansel’s physical and emotional burdens increased. He deteriorated, becoming little more than a twitching, emaciated wraith.

Then, three days before his fourteenth birthday, the Eater presented him with a gift—a waifish girl of twelve who had cropped hair and doe eyes.

She was to beAnsel’shelper and companion.

The girl had been terrified, trembling in a corner. After the witch beat her with a wooden spoon, it took Ansel hours of gentle coaxing to get her out from under the butcher block table.

Eventually, she came to trust him. And she did more than ease his physical burdens. She gave him purpose, a reason to bother surviving at all. He’d hated that she was trapped with him, but he let himself find comfort in loving her.

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