Chapter 706. From the Beginning

Maeve

Soren rises and walks to the pile of blankets scattered on the damp ground. Blankets that still smell like him, like us. He pulls a knife from the backpack, sliding the blade’s ridge over his palm–not hard enough to break the skin, but enough to feel it, likely imagining his own death by my hand.

The note remains where I dropped it, the ink now bleeding across the water-logged graph paper.

“My father,” he begins, “was an abusive, alcoholic gambler with a pension for driving his fists into my mother’s face. She wasn’t much better.” He walks toward me, twirling the knife and extending its hilt in my direction. “When he got tired of beating her, he liked to take it out on me. But I liked to hit back.”

I swallow hard as I curl my fingers around the hilt of the knife, and he lets go, but my chest is tight, and the blade is a dead weight as my hand falls to my lap. He holds my gaze for a few seconds before sitting on the ground a few feet away, his back again