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Mouse threw herself from the cart before it had even stopped moving, stumbling when she hit the ground but refusing to stop as she scrambled forward on quivering legs toward Riften’s gate.
Three days. Three days bumping across Skyrim in that rickety old carriage. Three days since she’d been stolen from her own bed in the middle of the night and had awoken in that nightmarish place, that bloodstained shack surrounded by nothing but fear and death and a terrible ultimatum. Three days since she had killed the assassin—her kidnapper—and run for the hills, confused and hurt and afraid. Three days since she’d staggered up to Solitude to find someone—anyone—who’d be willing to take her back to Riften.
Three days since she’d last seen Romlyn with no way of knowing if he was still alright.
Mouse wasn’t given to flights of fancy, but a thousand different terrible possibilities had run through her head while she’d been on the road—thoughts about what might have happened to him while she’d been gone. He hadn’t been with her when she’d awoken from her drug-induced sleep on the floor of that shack, and the assassin woman who’d taken her had been cold, so cold. The purr in her voice when she’d ordered Mouse to kill one of the captives, the almost sensual anticipation, still echoed in Mouse’s head and sent an icy trail of goosebumps up her spine. That woman had enjoyed murder. Luxuriated in it. And if she had been in Mouse’s house… If she’d gotten her hands on Romlyn… Gods, what if she’d… what if she’d done it to get revenge on Mouse for stealing that Dark Brotherhood contract?
I never should have gone after Grelod, Mouse thought with a nauseous lurch of terror. No matter what she’d done to me in the past, I should have left well enough alone. It wasn’t worth Romlyn. Nothing is.
It would be all her fault if he was dead now. The mere thought was like tar in her veins—a slow, clinging guilt pouring out from her heart.
Oh, Nocturnal, Prince of Thieves, steal him from death! Stendarr, Zenithar, Mara… Anyone who’s listening, please…
She didn’t make it a habit to pray, but she would do it for this. She would do it for him.
She kept up her litany as she sprinted for the gates. The guards didn’t stop her approach, but whether it was because they knew her face or because she moved too quickly for them to react, Mouse didn’t know. She thought she heard them call out to her under their helmets as she went by, but the words didn’t reach her past the thunder of blood in her ears. It didn’t matter what they said anyway. There was only one voice she wanted to hear right now.
She tore into the city and hooked right, her boots skidding under her as she turned between the inn and the bunkhouse toward the eastern edge of town where her own house sat, quiet and unassuming as it perched over the mild waters of Lake Honrich.
She and Romlyn had bought the place out of spite right after they’d married, a shot at Maven Black-Briar and that boot-licking ass-hat Indaryn who ran the meadery for her. Romlyn had been working there when Mouse had met him, a rough-and-tumble Dunmer filching merchandise from right under his employer’s nose with nothing more to his name than a penchant for trouble and a crooked grin that had sent a swarm of butterflies fluttering through Mouse’s stomach. She still remembered when she’d first visited the meadery as a middling member of the Thieves’ Guild, there to verify some numbers and check that the place was running to Maven’s standards. She’d gone down to the cellar where the mead was stored, and there he’d been, brash and ballsy as anything while he leaned against a keg and asked her if she wanted to buy a drink off him for half the asking price.
As a member of the Guild, she should have reported him to Maven for his little side hustle. Instead, she’d handed him twenty septims and told him to make it a double.
He’d been the only one in the whole damn place who never bent over backward to please the Black-Briars. She only found out later that that was why Indaryn had been skimming his wages, why he lived in a one-room house by the water that was always clogged with the stagnant scent of the canal, why he spent most nights at the Bee & Barb trying to pawn off bottles to all the patrons just to earn enough for dinner, and why he showed up to work even when he was so sick he could barely stand. His refusal to ignore Maven’s tyrannical grip on the city had made him both a target and a pariah, and the Black-Briars had made sure that as long as his defiant streak lasted, his life in Riften would make an eternity in Oblivion seem enviable by comparison.
Of course, neither of them had cared a whit about what the Black-Briars said or wanted when they married. They’d bought that lake-side house together as a middle-finger to Maven, and Romlyn in particular seemed to derive great pleasure from saluting her across the square when they both stepped out their front doors in the mornings.
The thought of his cheeky grin in those moments, the way he’d toss a conspiratorial wink Mouse’s way when he caught her watching him… it made her heart ache. She’d never really loved anyone before Romlyn. Relationships had just been a doorway to hurt, a liability in the dangerous underground circles she ran in. Being close to other people seemed like an easy way to open herself up to tragedy, to the possibility that they would be used and abused just to get to her. She’d never intended to love Romlyn at the start, but affection had a funny way of creeping up on even the most shuttered of hearts, and now the sheer depth of her feelings for him scared her. Scared her not because she didn’t want to love him, but because the mere thought of him being taken away from her carved a gaping pit in her stomach that she knew nothing could ever fill or make right again.
And if his death ended up being her fault… She knew there would be no healing from that wound.
Gods, please don’t punish him for my mistake!
She reached her own door at last, gasping and long past the verge of panic, and grabbed the latch, heart in throat when she realized it was unlocked even though evening had already descended. Because Romlyn always locked the door and gods, what if she was too late and the house was empty inside and he’d been buried already and she hadn’t even gotten to say goodbye and it’s all my fault?
Her body turned to ice, arm shaking as she wrenched the door open, throwing it back on its hinges as she rushed forward—
And ran into something warm and unyielding in the doorway. The shape of it was familiar, but for a second she couldn’t remember why until she heard the soft grunt of surprise above her, followed by a sharp hitch of breath and then a voice whispering her name as if it were a thing made of fractured glass.
“Mouse?”
It was quiet, barely more than a breath on the evening breeze, but it was the sound she had so longed to hear for the past three, long, terrible days.
She took a scrambling half step back, eagerness and a sudden hope pushing desperation into each movement, then looked up, and her eyes locked with his. Ruby red, tired, ringed with deep purple shadows darker even than the gray skin that surrounded them, but alive. Not the vacant glass beads she had been dreading. Alive.
“Romlyn?” she breathed. Her voice was shaking, but for once Mouse didn’t care, because in the very next moment his arms were around her and she was being crushed against him, her head buried in the crook of his neck with his familiar scent of honey, leather, and warm timber in her nose.
“Gods, love, where in Azura’s name were you?”
His voice tickled against her ear, all crackling gravel, course accent hitting staccato notes with each word he spoke. Most people thought it uncouth, but Mouse loved it, and the sound of it now filled her with such a vast symphony of emotion that all she could do was smile and cry and wrap her arms around his neck so tightly that she was pressed up against him with the feeling of his heartbeat thrumming against her own rib cage.
And then he didn’t say anything, but his lips brushed the point of her ear, firm and gentle all at once, and his hand cradled her head as he held her.
In a few minutes, Mouse would let go. They would go inside and lock the night behind them and she would tell him everything. She would be composed, even make a few quips, and then he would tell her how he’d looked for her every day since she’d disappeared and how he’d feared the worst when he could find no trace of her. And when he was done there would come a moment when they would look at each other and smile, and the relief would finally set in along with the exhaustion. Then they would go to bed together and sleep soundly for the first time in three days, her head on his chest and his arm around her waist.
But that was still a few minutes away. For the present, she would stay right here in her doorway under the waking stars, feeling Romlyn’s warmth around her and thanking every god she knew that he was hers and she was his, and that despite the turning of a dark, cruel world, they were both alright.