Page 47 of Winter's Edge
Afterward, I curled my body around Sasha's next to the fire, but my mind wouldn't shut off. It kept replaying details of our plan for tomorrow as if my subconscious would forget. Not likely. I'd committed everything to memory like I suspected Archer and Grady had. Tomorrow was far too important to make even the smallest mistake.
Sasha, on the other hand, went right to sleep, her little furry body warm and comforting. I pressed my lips between her ears—one of my very favorite places in all existence—and matched my breaths to hers.
The hairs along my arms prickled with the sensation that I was being watched over the crackling fire by two different sets of eyes. Watching me with Sasha. I’d grown too attached to her, and to Archer too. Yes, we weren't the same, but that didn't matter when it came to caring for something. The heart loved who it loved, and there wasn't much anyone could do about it.
"Aika," Archer said, his voice soft and sleepy.
"Yeah?"
A pause, then, "How were you poisoned?"
I firmed my mouth to keep anything from escaping. Those memories stirred up countless others, all of which hollowed out my chest and made me ache for another life. One where I wasn't me.
Useless.
So useless and broken.
"You don't have to tell me if you don't want to."
I'd never told anyone. Not even Jade, though I bet she suspected. She didn't miss much. But what did I have to lose by explaining what happened? They'd told me how they were poisoned. Talking about that and their pack mates seemed to help them…I don't know, face what happened. Reconcile it with the other horrors in this world. Remember the sharp ache so it might not sting so much the next time they thought about it.
"My baba…" I started, trying to figure out how to put this into words when it still didn't make any sense. "He wasn't the one who invented the poison. It was my ama. She was gifted in herbs and had supposedly helped her Baba make moonshine before coming here with her best friend—Lee and Jade’s mom—from the Far East. But she didn't know how much of her poisonous concoction was deadly or how much it took to significantly slow someone down."
I opened my mouth to explain the next part, but decided to backtrack first. Both directions filled me with dread, the spiky hot kind that swallowed up my neck.
"Ama wasn't a nice person. She yelled and screamed when something wasn't done right, even the smallest thing. She'd whip my brother and sister. She shouted at my baba and called him all sorts of things. And me… Well, I just got in her way and asked too many questions. So she decided to shut me up."
A slow, shaky breath sounded over the crackling fire, loud enough that it seemed Archer had been holding it for a while. Silence from Grady, not even a snore.
"She—" My voice wobbled because I could see her in my memory, stalking toward me with a glass container. She was shouting at five-year-old-me, telling me how useless I was. "She poured the poison down my throat. Not too long after, I started losing my sight."
"How old were you?" Grady asked, almost in a whisper.
"Five."
A low hiss from Grady. A string of impressive curses from Archer.
I barely heard them though. It was as if someone else were telling this story, as if it hadn’t happened to me but to someone else. Even so, I couldn't stop. The fastener on my lips had come undone.
"After that," I continued, "Ama knew exactly how much could slow someone down. She began selling her poison on the black market, secretive with no one the wiser, except for my family. The money she made went to help make more."
"Not to help you," Archer said, his voice edged with glass.
I went silent for a second, contemplating that fact for the first time ever. But not too much or I'd drive myself insane. No one had even brought up helping me, and I didn't even know if that was an option, then or now.
"No."I took a shaky breath, and then another to flush that thought away. "My parents fought all the time, but one time I heard Baba crying. In the nineteen years I've been alive, I've only heard him cry twice. That day and the day he got shot. I was maybe around ten when this happened, and I went to see if he was all right. He was in the barn, sobbing, and when I got there, Ama lost it. She started hitting him, hard. I didn’t know what was happening except Baba was…" My voice cracked. "Was crying. I had to help him get her off him, so I went for the tools I knew were hanging on the wall. I found the shovel and scooted it across the hay toward him. And after…I don't really remember. Just silence. No more crying. No more screaming. No more…Ama."
"Did he find out what she did to you?" Archer rasped like it hurt him to ask.
"I don't know. He didn't say a word. Hardly said a word to me for the next nine years. After that, he continued selling on the black market."
"I bet that's where Faust found him," Grady said.
I nodded, suddenly exhausted now that the weight I'd been carrying had centered itself inside me in order to be poured out. But I still felt it within me, raw and painful, as though my insides were now outside and it didn't change anything. Not really.
"Aika," Archer said, and I felt him slide closer and curl his fingers around my foot. "I'm sorry."
I shook my head, too tired and emotionally spent to tell him he had no reason to be.
