Page 145 of Born for Lace

Tight pussy.

Pain.

Freckles.

Pain.

A second heartbeat.

I should have left her at the farming community to be with her kind, free and easy. There, where she is safe, but is she? If they are ever attacked, if a man ever wants her, who will risk it all, who will bring entire towns to the ground, step over children, to get to her. Only her… Only me.

That is my darkness.

Her words stir through the steady resonance of wind.“Then why can't we do that now! Find a place. Stay together, and we can have new, great experiences. We can kiss, and I will protect you, and you can protect me, and we will be together.”

I will protect her.

Every small noise is like an itch inside my ears, too deep to scratch. I remember coming out of the torture of Noise Conditioning when I was sixteen.

Every time I hear the faintest of sounds, my muscles awaken with the need to protect. To protect my flower and my children.

Even as a rational part of me hears the wind whistling through the windows, rocking them against the frames.

Knock. Knock.

I know it’s the wind.

A visceral and primal need wins. I climb to my feet, head outside to challenge the Redwind and stalk the perimeter of the farmhouse. I will protect her—them—from the world, from the depravities and evil that I know lurks within my own flesh.

And blood.

ChapterForty-Six

Dahlia

I don’t remember the final half of the journey, or bringing my bags inside, or hanging my clothes, or going to sleep, but I wake up lighter than I’ve been in months in the quiet isolation of the shelter beneath the farmhouse.

The weight of our unspoken words and fractured closure is no longer heavy in my lower belly.

I inhale deeply. My chest fills with optimism, awe, and the steady beat from a well-rested heart.

I leave Spero sleeping on the mattress and go to the solid metal doors.

The bunker seems to breathe as I open it. I step up to the ground floor. The first-light haze filters through the farmhouse, highlighting dust and fragments in the air.

This is my new home.

My forever home…

Our forever home.

I pass down the corridor—admiring the floorboards and trimmings on the walls for the first time—then navigate my way toward the front door that Lagos carried me through months ago.

Hecarriedme over the threshold, which is such a lovely story to tell our children one day.

The house is still but for the wind outside. I don’t know what the walls are made of, some kind of brick, but it does mute the weather, the only echoes of the Redwind coming from the windows.

I am approaching the front of the house when I see something on the ground. I freeze. Lagos is slumped on the floor, long legs stretched out in front of him, a barricade in front of the door.

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