A Hunger Most Dark novel · Chapter 13 of 24

Chapter 13: What Corwin Kept

Lenore's POV

He did not touch the scar.

His hand stayed an inch from my shoulder, shaking, and I stood with my back to him and waited to be hurt.

I had known for fifteen years how this would go.

He would say he remembered, and I would hit him.

"Lenore," Dav said. "I didn't know."

His voice broke on my name.

I pulled the shift up over my shoulder and turned around.

His face had gone grey, and his eyes were wet, and he made no effort to hide it.

I wanted to believe him so badly that it frightened me.

"You'd say that either way," I said.

"Yes. I would."

"Then it isn't worth hearing."

He nodded and did not argue.

The Dav I knew always argued, and that was the part I couldn't stand.

I put the coat over my arm and walked out past Ysmay, who was crying without a sound.

I did not put the coat on.

That night I lay on the cot in the cellar room with the door propped open and listened to the house.

At midnight there was a creak on the eleventh step.

I did not have to look to know who it was.

He had brought the lamp, and he had set it down on the stone beside him.

"You don't have to talk," Dav said from the dark of the stairs. "I only wanted to be where you could find me."

I stared at the ceiling.

"Corwin held me over the Rooke well by my ankles," I said. "The winter I was eight."

The stairs were silent.

"He said a pale man lived down there and ate girls who cried. He let go of one ankle to make me believe it." I could feel the cold coming up out of that well even now. "I didn't cry. I swore I'd never cry again."

"Lenore."

"Two weeks later my father brought home a boy my size to work off a debt. I put the pale man in the well under his cellar, because I had nowhere else to put him."

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