Chapter 43: Convalescent Cruelty
The taste of her, antiseptic and iron, was still on his lips. A phantom sting. Marcus lay on his back, the dawn light now a guilty grey against the window, his heart a trapped bird against his ribs. Serenity had rolled off him, a shudder moving through her like a fault line, and now she was just a still, breathing shape beside him, facing the wall.
The sheets were cool where she’d been sitting on him.
He pushed himself up on his elbows. His mouth was dry. “Ren.”
She didn’t move.
“Serenity.” He reached out, his hand hovering over the ridge of her shoulder. He could see the dark, angry lines of the sutures crossing the landscape of her back, a brutal map of last night’s war. Some of them were damp, weeping a clear fluid. He let his hand fall, afraid to touch. “Talk to me. Please.”
“What’s to say?” Her voice was gravel, crushed under the weight of everything. “You saw it. You tasted it. That’s what I am now. A torn-up thing that needs stitching.”
“That’s not what you are.” He shifted closer, his body aligning with the curve of hers, not touching, just sharing the warmth. “You’re my wife. You’re the woman who walked out of that place on her own two feet after what Bernice tried to do. You’re a goddamn miracle.”
A harsh, wet sound escaped her. A laugh or a sob, he couldn’t tell. “Miracles don’t come with a five-thousand-dollar medical debt, Marcus. Miracles don’t make their husbands vomit in the front row.”
He flinched. The memory was a physical thing—the sound, the smell, the way his body had revolted at the spectacle of the woman he loved being turned inside out. “I wasn’t… it wasn’t because of you. It was because of that place. What they make you do.”
“They don’t make me do anything.” She finally turned, wincing as the movement pulled at her stomach. Her eyes were red-rimmed, exhausted, but burning. “I choose it. Every time. I choose to go in there so we don’t lose the house. So your mother’s care facility doesn’t kick her out. I choose the boot, and the fist, and the…” Her voice hitched, her hand going instinctively to her lower abdomen. “I choose it.”
The weight of it, the sheer tonnage of that truth, pressed the air from the room. Marcus saw it all, the relentless math of their lives. Her body broken down into dollar signs, each scar a down payment, each scream an installment.
“Then I’m choosing something too,” he said, his own voice low and firm. “I’m choosing you. Not the fighter. You. And I’m saying it stops. This one… this one has to be the last, Ren. Look at you.”
“I know what I look like.” She sat up slowly, a monument of pain and will. “I see it. But you think Bernice is just gonna let me walk away? After what I did to her? She’ll take it as weakness. She’ll come for everything we have twice as hard.”
“Let her come.” Marcus got out of bed, pacing the short length of the worn rug. “We’ll figure it out. We’ll sell the car. I’ll get the night shift at the plant. We’ll move to a smaller place.”
“Your back can’t handle the night shift,” she said, and the simple practicality of her concern undid him. Even now, she was calculating his limits.
“My back is fine. My heart isn’t.” He stopped pacing, standing at the foot of the bed looking at her. “I can’t watch it again. I can’t sit there and see her, or someone like her, try to take you apart piece by piece. Last night… when you twisted that… when you screamed…” He couldn’t finish. The twin screams, agony and something else, something terrible and ecstatic, still echoed in his skull. “I lost years of my life in that moment. I can’t do it again.”
Silence filled the space between them, heavy and warm. A truck rumbled by outside, shaking the windowpane.
Serenity looked down at her own hands, at the knuckles still swollen and scraped. The hands that had twisted a rival’s uterus into a weapon. The hands that held his face so gently when he was sick.
“It’s all I know how to do,” she whispered, the admission leaving her deflated. “Since I was a girl. Fighting is the only thing I’ve ever been good at that pays.”
He came back to the bed, kneeling on the floor beside it so his eyes were level with hers. He took one of those battered hands in both of his. “You’re good at me,” he said, a faint smile touching his lips. “You’re excellent at me. And we’ll figure the rest out. Together.”
A single tear finally broke free, tracing a clean path through the sweat and salt still on her cheek. She didn’t wipe it away. She leaned her forehead against his, their breath mingling, replacing the ghost of antiseptic with something human, something theirs.
“Okay,” she breathed, the word barely a sound. “Okay. One last fight.”
“Ren—”
“No. You’re right. But it has to be one last fight. A real one. I have to go back to The Abattoir. I have to beat her clean, in front of everyone. I have to leave as the undisputed champ, not as someone who ran. That’s the only way we walk away and she doesn’t follow.” She pulled back, her eyes searching his. “You understand? I need to close the door myself. Or it’ll never stay shut.”
He understood. It was the worst kind of sense. He hated it. He nodded, the motion feeling like it required cables and pulleys in his neck. “One last one,” he echoed, the words tasting like ash.
She squeezed his hand, then let go, lying back down with a exhausted sigh. “Now, come hold me. These stitches feel like they’re full of hornets.”
He slid into bed beside her, carefully draping an arm over her waist, avoiding the wounded flesh. He pressed his lips to the back of her neck, a silent promise, a prayer.
Outside, the grey dawn was giving way to a pale, indifferent blue. The room held its breath. The debt remained. The threat of Bernice lingered like a sour smell. But for this moment, there was just the two of them in the quiet, clinging to the fragile peace between battles, knowing the last and worst one was still to come.