Prying one of her hands off my shoulder, I pushed through the urge to forget the purpose of the day when she whimpered. Her fingers scrabbled along the rock, looking for something to hold on to as I turned her in my arms so that she faced it. I pressed into her back, placing my hands next to hers on the rock and feeling her body tremble as she panted for breath.
"I can't," she whispered, shaking her head.
"Why, Isa?" Something lurked in those fears, something far deeper than what I imagined had to be normal for a drowning accident in her childhood. I reached a hand down her leg, my fingers gliding over the raised skin of the scar on her thigh. She jolted in my arms, moving as if to climb out of the water. But my body at her back prevented her from getting the leverage she needed to pull herself out.
I was a bastard. I was cruel. I was everything she should have avoided.
I couldn't walk away from what I'd started, even as I felt her unravel in my arms. Her fear was like a tangible poison, clouding the clear waters with darkness as she was lost to whatever trauma gripped her from her memories. "What happened in that river?" I asked, digging my fingers into the flesh of her thigh lightly to use that quick flash of pain to draw her back to the present.
She shuddered in my arms, shaking her head quickly. "I drowned."
"Then where did you get this scar?" There was nothing else in her history to indicate she'd had any other accidents. Not one hospital visit. Not a strange injury on a doctor's report.
Nothing.
She paused, her voice barely a whisper when she finally spoke part of the truth that tore her up inside. "My mother said it was barbed wire."
"You got caught up in barbed wire in the river?" I asked, trying to keep my voice light despite the agony tearing me up inside. To be five years old and be caught in the currents must have been terrifying enough as her lungs filled with water and set her insides on fire, but to survive all that while being caught in something that literally tore into her skin?
I exhaled, wondering why there'd been no record of the injury in the emergency report. I couldn't very well ask her, given that I shouldn't have ever seen the fucking thing. I made a mental note to have Matteo track down the people responsible, so that I could find the full truth of what Isa didn't say.
Her choice of words was unique. As if she herself didn't believe her mother.
"You don't think that's what it was," I observed, looking down to watch how still she kept her legs. Even for someone who didn't know how to swim, natural instinct in water was to move. To feel the fluidity of movements that we couldn't achieve on land.
Isa didn't move. She was as stiff as a log from her torso down, the only part of her that dared to move being what was out of the water.
"It was barbed wire," Isa corrected herself, clenching her eyes shut. "It couldn't have been anything else."
I knew better than most what it was to be haunted by spirits, by the tricks of shadows and light and what they could cause in our memories. Shadows had danced off the flames as my mother burned, looking like demons coming to raise hell on earth, to a child who watched his mother die a cruel death. They’d swallowed her whole until there'd been nothing left of the only woman I'd ever cared for.
Until Isa.
"What did you see in the water, Princesa?" I asked, waiting as the rest of her body went solid in my arms.
"I saw phantoms," she whispered. "Shadows in the water as they moved like nightmares. Coming for me. Grabbing my leg and trying to pull me under. I know they weren't real. They couldn't have been, but—"
"Nobody can tell you what you saw in the water. Whether it was real or not, you saw it. You felt it in that moment. You've lived with it for all these years. Have you told anyone about them?" I asked, pressing closer to her to try to use my body to comfort her. Under no illusions that I knew the whole truth regarding the accident, I regretfully knew that pushing her to talk about the shadows was the limit for the day. I wouldn't learn the truth of Odina's hatred just yet, not with the way she shivered in my arms as she thought back to those phantoms.
Nightmares come to life, and yet she was comforted by a living embodiment of everything she feared in the water. I suspected my Isa also had a nightmare inside her, waiting to come out when I unlocked the part of her she so carefully controlled.
Containing her would be like holding a demon in my arms, and I looked forward to the fight.
"My grandmother says that water is sacred. That the veil between life and death is thinner in it. I was drowning, half dead already. She says what I saw was real, that I'm one of the few people to experience it before I die. They tried to take me, but they couldn't so they took Odina instead," she whispered, a tear dripping down her face as she cried for the sister she'd lost that day.
Whatever had caused it, Isa wore the guilt of it on her soul. Maybe that was why she'd suffered through years of abuse at her sister's hands before putting a stop to it.
"It sounds like your grandmother thinks it's a good thing," I murmured, inching my body away from hers so that she had to be on her own for a few moments.
"She thinks it shows how strong I am. That they couldn't claim me as theirs," she scoffed. "But they would have if my mother hadn't pulled me out
