Chapter 4: Bound by Silver Chains
She almost didn't find the cave.
The full moon was three days away and Lex hadn't come to the forest in four evenings. Ava had told herself, with diminishing conviction, that she was not counting. She collected her herbs. She brewed her medicines. She woke up on the fifth morning with his grief sitting in her chest like a stone she didn't remember swallowing and walked into the forest in the gray pre-dawn because apparently she had entirely lost the ability to pretend.
She heard the chains before she saw him.
The sound was wrong—not the rattle of metal moving freely, but the groan of restraint under sustained pressure. She followed it to a crack in the hillside, wide enough to be a door if you were determined, and inside—
She stopped breathing.
He had chained himself to the cave wall.
Both wrists. The metal links were thick as her thumb, silver that had eaten into his skin wherever it touched, leaving raw burns that should have had him on his knees. He was on his knees. His head was down. His body was rigid with effort, every muscle locked against itself, and she could see it happening at the edges—the tremor in his hands, the wrong angle of his spine, the gold bleeding back into his eyes as the moon's pull clawed at him.
"Get out."
His voice was gravel and warning.
"Lex—"
"Ava." He raised his head, and the eyes that found her were half his and half something ancient and ravenous. "I am asking you. Get out of this cave and do not come back until morning."
She understood then, with a clarity that settled cold in her stomach—not fear of him, but fear for him. She understood what the chains were for. Not to protect him.
To protect her.
She understood what the instinct he was fighting had whispered to do to her.
"You'll hurt yourself."
"I've been hurting myself for six years." The words came through his teeth. "I'm used to it."
The blood from the silver burns was tracking down his forearms in slow rivulets. She took one step forward, and the sound that came from him stopped her—not a word, not a growl, but something that existed between those categories, something that made every hair on her body stand up.
And yet beneath it—beneath the feral warning—she felt the other thing. The anguish of a man doing the most violent thing he was capable of to himself because the alternative was a violence he found completely unthinkable.
Her eyes burned.
"You don't have to do this alone," she said, and her voice cracked on the last word.
For a moment, just a moment, something broke open in his face.
Then he looked away from her. "Yes," he said quietly. "I do."
She stood outside the cave until dawn broke pale and cold through the trees. She didn't know if he could feel her there. She stayed anyway.
